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It isa benediction of nature that generally we remember more vividly and oftener what has given us happiness rather than what has given us pain. Christmas in particular is the time for recollecting, and now I am recollecting Christmases even more remote in character from modern Christmases than they are in time.
We lived on a ranch twenty-seven horse miles from our “shopping center.� That was Beeville, Texas, which later became the family home. Three or four times a year a wagon went to town and hauled out supplies, but the biggest haul was just before Christmas.
As I look back, those days seem to have been days of great plenitude—not because of anything like family prosperity, for we lived meagerly, but because of the necessity of local stockpiling. Sugar came in barrels, molasses in kegs or big jugs, flour in barrels or in tiers of 48-pound sacks, beans and coffee in bushel sacks (the coffee to be roasted and ground), lard in 50-pound cans, tomatoes, salmon, and other canned goods in cases. Then at Christmas time there was a large wooden bucket of mixed candy—enough for us six children, for our visiting cousins, and for the children of several Mexican families living on the ranch, most of them farmers. Each of these families received also a new blanket and a sack of fruit.
We had home-made candy not infrequently, but Christmas was the only time of year when it snowed candy. There were no chocolates, as I recollect—just a mixture of lemon drops and an assortment of variously shaped hunks of sugar, both hard and gummy, variously colored, alloyed, and flavored, with peppermint being dominant.
Christmas was also distinguished by apples, oranges, raisins (on stems), almonds, walnuts,pecans, and a coconut or two. We ate some of the coconut as broken out of the shells, but its main function was to be grated and mixed with sliced oranges and sugar into ambrosia—as inevitable for Christmas dinner as turkey is for Thanksgiving. Nobody then dreamed of having fruit every morning for breakfast. Oranges, apples, raisins, and nuts were put into stockings and hung on Christmas trees. They were a rare treat.
These fruits and nuts left a stronger impression on my mind than all other gifts associated with childhood Christmases except books, firecrackers, Roman candles—and my first new saddle. There were tin bugles, toy trains, and dolls for the girls, but we—the boys, at least—had so much fun making our own toys that no bought toy has left any impression on my memory. Christmas was the time for new pocket knives, and very useful they were. My father taught us to whittle water-wheels, which could be run only when an occasional rain made Long Hollow run. The axle for the wheel might be a piece of wood or a section of dried cornstalk, less durable but much more easily fitted with paddles than hard wood. The toy bugles wouldnot split the air as brightly as cane whistles whittled out of an old fishing pole.
We may have had colored balloons at some Christmas, but I recollect only the ones made from bladders. Hog-killing time is cold weather. The chief prize for us from every hog and every calf, cow, or steer butchered was the bladder. A human mouth was the only air-pump for blowing up this home-contrived balloon. Held, air-expanded, near a fire, it would keep on expanding until the material was very thin and dry. Then came the climax—an explosion. Nobody wanted to part with his bladder-balloon, but that grand explosion could not be resisted.
I never heard of Fourth of July fireworks until I was nearly grown. Firecrackers and Roman candles were as much a part of Christmas as ambrosia. The firecrackers could be set off by day, but the Roman candles were for darkness, when everybody watched the pyrotechnics. They vanished all too quickly, like most other beautiful things—but not from the great reality called memory.
There were toy pistols and airguns, but a new pair of rubbers for a nigger-shooter gave just as much satisfaction. At one time we gotmore satisfaction from lead bullets gouged out of live oak trees than from any other form of shooting. Our house was on the edge of a grove of scores of live oak trees, some of them very large and old. When Uncle Ed Dubose, my mother’s half brother, came in the fall to hunt and again at Christmas time with all the family, he freely spent ammunition perfecting his marksmanship. His targets were tree trunks. He was an indefatigable treasure-hunter also, but he never found a bonanza comparable to that he left us children in the form of lead.
From it, from solder melted off tin cans, and from now and then a haul of babbitt found in wornout windmills, we minted dollars. We melted our metal in a large iron spoon over an outdoor fire and poured the liquid into a round wooden bluing box, wherein it quickly cooled and solidified. (Bluing for laundry in those days came in powdered form, for dissolving in water—in wooden boxes, with tops that screwed on, about the diameter of a dollar.) This free coinage was limited only by the supply of crude metal. The more canned goods we consumed and the more old bullets we could find, the higher the rate of coinage. The two principaluses the dollars had were for pitching—into holes in the ground—and for buying cattle, horses, sheep, and goats from each other.
Each of us had a play ranch enclosed by miniature fences—twine (our barbed wire) strung on sticks stuck into the ground like posts. Our cattle were tips of horns that had been sawed off cattle at the chute in the big picket cowpens about a hundred yards from the house. Our horses were spools from which my mother and neighbors had used the thread in endless sewing; our goats were empty snail shells; our sheep were oak galls. Sheep and goats were very plentiful and, therefore, had a low value; cattle and horses were harder to come by.
With running irons made of baling wire and heated red hot in a fire, we branded the cattle, sheep, and horses, but could not brand the snail-shell goats. We made long trains of flat rectangular sardine cans, coupled together by pieces of wire, to haul the stock from ranch to ranch. Our dog, Old Joe—named after Beautiful Joe, the wonderful hero of a favorite book—made a very unsatisfactory engine to pull the freight train. We hitched green lizards, snared with the hair of horsetail, to a single sardine can or to acardboard matchbox that served as a wagon. Lizards never make tractable teams.
This ranching, with all of its ramifications, was not primarily Christmas play. It went on more in the summer than in the winter, but no Christmas toys could compete with it. Certain Christmas books added to prolonged play.
We children always knew positively that there would be books on the Christmas tree or in our stockings. We always wanted particular titles, and we had the before-Christmas pleasure of speculating on what known and unknown books Santa Claus might bring. I don’t remember what Christmas it was thatIvanhoecame to make knights of us boys. Old Stray, an irritatingly gentle horse that could hardly be forced out of a walk, enriched the flowering of our knighthood.Swiss Family Robinsonmade us into cave-dwellers. We dug our own cave into the bank of Long Hollow, some distance below the house.
I wasn’t yet reading when for Christmas I received an illustrated book, with a linen cover, about an owl that hooted. On demand my father read it aloud over and over. We could hear owls hooting in the live oaks many nights of the year, and my father could talk owl talk. Every timehe read the book he had to tell us what the owl says, in words long drawn out from deep down: “I cook for myself. Who cooks for you-all?� There are very few conversationalists to whom I had rather listen than to a hoot owl, and often to this day his lonely and beautifulwho-ingtakes me back to a Christmas of childhood, to a child’s book, and to my father’s voice.
There were no commercial Santa Clauses in the country, so far as I know. The only Santa Claus for us was my father. At an early age I learned his identity, but that knowledge had no effect on the great illusion, any more than knowing that a grown woman could not literally live in a shoe had on the Mother Goose fact that there was an old woman who lived in a shoe—and she had so many children she didn’t know what to do.
My father cut the Christmas tree out in the pasture—a comely live oak or maybe a “knock-away� (anacahuita)—and brought it in secretly. After it was hung with gifts and lighted with little colored candles and we had all gathered to behold it, Santa Claus would bound in, all in white and red, as cheery in his ruddy complexion, reindeer country manners, other-world talk, andcontagious spirits as the Saint Nicholas of “The Night before Christmas.� In disguised voice he called out the names on the packages and added joy to the gift in the way he presented it. Then he would disappear, and presently Papa would come in and claim his own presents with as much eagerness as we had received ours.
“The gift without the giver is bare.� Gifts can be manufactured, some beautiful, many useful, but giving-out feelings can’t be—though they can be cultivated. The love and cheer associated with Christmas will always be the best thing about it. How often just a good word that conveys the word-giver’s generosity of spirit enriches people! I remember the “Merry Christmas, sir!� of a gray-haired woman scrubbing stone steps at a college in Cambridge, England, during the war; and recollection of her sturdy, cheerful, kind nature brightens my world. I can hear my mother’s “Christmas Gift� or “Merry Christmas� as I write these words. Whoever heard her greeting received a gift, for she meant every syllable of it, felt every tone in it.
Sunrise, starlight, silence of dusk are never trite. Generous feelings and cheering words are never trite. Merry Christmas!