Tis’ A Mystery
Christmas stories are filled with mystery. A family Christmas story might be comprised of our personal memories and mysteries. They will be collections of what we were taught as children and what we have chosen to teach our children.
Christmas stories have an intellectual richness to them. Morality stories abound from the New Testament to Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol to the movie It’s a Wonderful Life to Truman Capote’s novella A Christmas Memory to the 1971 television adaptation of Earl Hamner’s The Homecoming. All are morally and ethically fertile.
We tell our tales of Christmases past and in doing so, we generationally preserve our family and friends. Perhaps it sounds a tad hokey, but it is in the telling of our stories that we preserve what is meaningful.
Thereby Christmas Past becomes a part of Christmas Present. The joyful and the melancholy intrude into the present. We allow ourselves to embrace people now passed and through the retelling of their stories, love them yet again.
Through this process we introduce them to generations who otherwise might barely know them. I’m not certain that my family has ever considered the Christmas stories I’m so fond of telling to be gifts.
Now that I think about it, I hope the stories are presents from one generation to the next. I do like telling our children and our grandchildren about my parents and my grandparents.
I don’t know that I’m a decent judge of the quality of the stories but I love telling them. Saint Francis of Assisi said, “For it is in giving that we receive.”
I believe few enjoyed Christmas more than my father. I swear he would be out of bed at 5AM banging on pots and pans intent on waking his grandchildren.
As to stories, his personal favorite involved a Christmas decision that almost cost him his job in 1937. I was not yet one year old and he was employed as a butcher’s assistant at the largest grocery and market in Stigler. It seems the owner went through the store on Christmas Eve and announced the store would be open for a half-day on Christmas.
Bearing in mind that jobs were difficult to find and easy to lose during the Depression, Dad nonetheless told the owner he had a family and he would not be there. He expressed the belief that a man should be with his family on Christmas Day. As the story was told, the owner went right back through the store rescinding his Christmas Day directive.
My father always told this story with great pride. Further, I never had any doubt that my mother’s pride in him only grew with each telling.
“Maybe Christmas, the Grinch thought, doesn’t come from a store.” – Dr. Suess
