A Simple Christmas (10 page)

5.

Traditions

Why do we do what we do at Christmas? Why do we do the same things the same way at the same time and with the same people? From the food we eat to the decorations we hang on the tree to the way we exchange gifts to the ritual of having one of the children in the family read the Christmas story from Luke 2, traditions are as much a part of what makes Christmas special as the meaning behind it. Those traditions give us comfort and familiarity and a sense of well-being. Traditions don't have to be fancy or costly—they just have to be consistent. We keep them because we need them to reassure us that, no matter how crazy our lives become and how many things change, there are some things that will stay the same, and those are the things that anchor us to who we are. The older I get, the more I cherish traditions, especially at Christmas.

I will spend more nights in a hotel this year than I will at home. Far more. Somewhere between 200 and 250 nights this year I will sleep in a hotel room and live like a vagabond—living out of a suitcase, dining on takeout, and hopping from airplane to airplane. I will, for the most part, stay in one of the Marriott brands for a reason that probably only makes sense to fellow frequent travelers. I choose Marriott because it's predictable, or, put another way, familiar.

When a person spends so much of his time changing cities, hotels, and locations on an almost nightly basis, it's a comfort to not have to totally reorient to the little things every day. I think I would be a great consultant to airlines and hotel chains because I could explain to them how to do a better job of keeping repeat customers! I don't care about beautiful lobbies and elaborate water features in the atrium—I want to be able to pull my bags into the room at the end of an exhausting day and have such a sense of familiarity that I don't feel disconnected from my routine.

I know that the room layout in a Courtyard by Marriott hotel is pretty much the same in Los Angeles as it is in Des Moines and Charlotte. I know how the clocks and TVs work; I know how many pillows I will have, what the shampoo and soap will be packaged in, and how the thermostat works. I know what kind of shower the room will have and what the towels will feel like. Same for the other Marriott brands, where there is an overall consistency from town to town, hotel to hotel, and room to room.

When I can't be home to enjoy the comfort and familiarity of my home and my family (my wife and three dogs), the least I can ask for is not having to waste any time relearning the nuances of a hotel in which I will only be staying a few hours. It's not nice artwork on the walls or elaborate fixtures that matter to me, but good Internet connections, quiet rooms, and people authorized to fix a problem on-site if it arises.

Essentially, it's creating a “tradition.” We get comfort and a sense of calm from things happening the same way each time. It is the sociological equivalent of navigation points on our psychological GPS systems that tell us that, as long as at least some things stay constant in our lives, we are okay and things are on track.

This is especially important at Christmas, when we take the time to reconnect with people and reflect on our lives. Though we may have changed jobs, moved, had a health crisis, or experienced the death of a family member in the past year, Christmas traditions give us security and peace of mind. One of my close Catholic friends once explained to me why he loved and appreciated the very predictable and routine Catholic liturgy. He told me that no matter where in the world he was, he could go to a Catholic church and have the exact same service that he would have had at home. It was comforting to him that, in the midst of total turmoil and turbulence in the world, there was one place where the traditions gave him a deep sense of whole-ness and tranquility. That made sense and helped me appreciate the attraction for many Catholics who take comfort in the fact that their church will be stable and constant. Since I come from the free-church model of evangelical theology, the constant in my church experience was the doctrine and the adherence to more rigid interpretations of the Bible. The church we attend is
very
nontraditional. The worship and music are contemporary—the polar opposite of the form of worship we had when we were younger. But even this modern church has traditions, or ways of doing things that are predictable and therefore comforting.

I've taken several trips across the state of Arkansas, from the northwest corner to the southeast corner, traveling solely by way of my BassCat bass boat. Navigating the Arkansas River for 308 miles is a wonderful experience and allows me to experience the sheer splendor of my state's beauty like no other method. But I know that I have to pay very careful attention to the red and green navigation markers in the navigable channel or risk running aground in shallows or hitting rock jetties under the surface. When we have no navigation markers to guide us, we can run aground.

Christmas traditions are a part of what keeps us “in the channel.” I feel sorry for people who have no real Christmas traditions and wonder if they sometimes feel as though the holiday is just another hectic, confusing, and stressful time of year, rather than a peaceful and serene season.

Growing up, our family had traditions that provided a source of certainty in an otherwise uncertain world. From my earliest memories, I can remember the Saturday expedition that my dad and I would take a couple of weeks before Christmas for the annual Christmas tree hunt. We would go to my uncle's farm and traipse through the woods looking for a small cedar tree that we'd cut down, drag back to my dad's pickup truck, and haul home to be mounted in a bucket (that was its base) and decorated. The excursion meant I had to put on my little rubber boots to keep my feet warm and dry as we walked for a long time through pastures, fields, and forests until we found our Christmas tree. As I look at the photos from those days, it appears that our trees would make the Charlie Brown Christmas tree seem fit for the White House! But we were always proud to have it, and because we got it at my uncle's farm, it was free. I was always amazed that people went to Christmas tree lots and bought trees. I wanted to put my head out the truck window and scream, “People, there are trees in the woods!”

Most of the trees we had were cedar. I knew that the cedar branches could really irritate my arms when I had to handle the tree, but I was in my twenties when I found out that I was actually allergic to cedar trees! That's why my skin itched and my throat was scratchy and my nose was runny—Christmas was killing me.

While the “men” were out doing the “manly” task of chopping down one of God's trees, the “womenfolk” (mother and sister) stayed at home doing what they always did on that day—make divinity candy, chocolate chip cookies, and roasted pecans. The pecans were from our own two highly productive pecan trees, and the recipe to roast them is one I still use every year. It's one of the few recipes from my mother's mental library that I actually learned, and it turns out I'm not the only one who thinks those are the best roasted pecans ever. Every year when I make them, I'm told they are the best. (Of course, usually the people who tell me that are those who work for me and therefore aren't about to tell me that my pecans are garbage, but they
are
good.) Too bad I didn't learn the cookie or divinity recipe.

Once we had the scrawny little tree, which seemed big to me at the time, all set up, it was time to decorate. We had the same glass ornaments that had been carefully tucked away in boxes and stored in the attic from the year before. Seeing them each year gave me such a sense of comfort. Those delicate and colorful little balls of glass had survived another year, and so had we. The “girls” put the ornaments on, but first my dad wired up the lights. This meant rolling the string of lights out on the floor and testing the bulbs and replacing the ones that hadn't survived their year in storage. The most vivid Christmas memory my sister and I have is probably one of my dad, who one year accidently stuck his finger into an empty light socket and felt the full impact of 110 volts of electricity. He was momentarily frozen in a cartoonlike pose, eyes bugged out, uttering a profanity (I will spare you) that, due to the electricity, just dragged out for several seconds. Had it killed him, we probably wouldn't have found it so funny, but it didn't kill him. It nearly killed us, though, as we almost died with laughter listening to his electrically charged and elongated expression of a word that was a synonym for feces. I will use the more appropriate substitute but try to illustrate the sound in writing: “Shooooooooooooooooooooooooot!” Okay, you had to be there, but believe me when I tell you it was worth the price of that month's electric bill.

In addition to the trip to the woods for the tree and the decorations, Christmas was filled with other familiar traditions that I fondly recall and a few that I just recall, without so much fondness.

The Hope Fire Department hosted a Christmas dinner for the firemen and their families each year. The fire trucks were moved outside of the station, and the entire interior was turned into a large dining hall with long tables set up for the big dinner, which included all the typical turkey and dressing, vegetables, and desserts imaginable. The big moment of the night was near the end, when Santa Claus himself came and gave every kid a great big peppermint candy cane. We also got to tell him what we wanted for Christmas, even though by that time I had already sent a letter to the North Pole and was somewhat disappointed that he didn't remember all that stuff I had listed. But this also gave me hope that he had forgotten what a little monster I had been throughout the year and that maybe he would cut me some slack and give me something better than the lump of coal I'd been threatened with. After Santa came with the candy, he headed back to the North Pole (it's a long trip from Arkansas, and he had a lot of toys left to make anyway). Then came the part that, as kids, we looked forward to even more than Santa—we got to take a ride around town on one of the big fire trucks and even got to ring the bell and blow the siren. I can only imagine the blistering press treatment a fire department would receive today if it loaded a bunch of kids onto a city-owned truck and drove them around town shattering the peace and quiet of the night with sirens and clanging bells. Not to mention the liability the department would incur for having those kids in the truck in the first place. Of course, those didn't even include the risks we took by repeatedly sliding down the big brass fire poles that connected the upstairs sleeping quarters to the area where the trucks were. One other thing happened at that firemen's supper that made it even more exciting—the firemen opened up the soft-drink machine and instead of making us pay ten cents for a Coke as usual, they would give them to us for
free
! How good could it get?

Back then Christmas traditions weren't limited to places of employment. In those days, schoolteachers didn't know what the ACLU was and would have laughed them out of town if they had dared suggest we stop singing Christmas carols, telling the Christmas story, or having a Christmas party in school. Every Christmas at Brookwood Elementary, which I attended through the sixth grade, each student in our class put their name in a bowl and then we all drew names to see who we would get a gift for. One of the kids in our class was a Jehovah's Witness, and since they don't observe Christmas celebrations, he was always excused from this drawing and didn't come to school on the day of the party. In today's world, his parents would have sued the bricks off the school, and we never would have had the Christmas party. None of us thought of it as a big deal that our classmate didn't participate and frankly respected the fact that he took his faith so seriously.

The teacher put limits on how much we could spend for each gift—never more than a dollar in the years I attended—so that everyone got an equally good gift. Of course, we always got the teacher something as well, but I don't recall what I ever got any of my teachers since my mother handled that—I just wanted to make sure that the gift I gave a classmate didn't make him cry because he thought it was crappy. And, of course, I hoped that the gift I received didn't make me cry because I thought it was crappy.

The only thing more exciting than being able to goof around all day in school on the last day before Christmas break was knowing that we'd have two weeks out of school. It meant that Uncle Garvin would be coming for a visit and that we'd have more time to sneak open our presents during the day and play with them while our parents were still at work. Christmas vacation, here we come!

Of course, home, work, and school weren't the only places we had Christmas traditions. If there ever was a place where things stayed the same, it was church. They really couldn't afford to change anything about Christmas, which was fine by me. There was always a Christmas pageant where all the kids in Sunday school would sing a carol or two at a special service. It was one way of making sure all the parents showed up for church at least once a year, because they'd come to watch their kids sing even though they might not come and hear the preacher scream.