A Simple Christmas (11 page)

Preachers at my little Baptist church in those days tended to do a lot of screaming, which literally scared the hell out of me and also did a good job of keeping me wide awake. It didn't work for everyone, though. Because I couldn't understand all the sermon material, I would usually occupy my time by observing two men in our church. One was an older gentleman who loved church because apparently it was the best sleep he got all week. I think the preacher had to scream just to be heard over the sound of his snoring. (I would use names here, but there are families of these guys who are still around, and even though I don't think I could get sued for slander, why take the risk?) The other man said “Amen!” really loudly to basically everything the preacher said. I figured that was the stuff that was really good, since it evoked such a strong, outward, verbal affirmation from the man my sister and I affectionately called Mr. Amen. We would count the number of amens in a service, and it was about as accurate a way to judge the quality of the sermon as Siskel and Ebert's thumbs were to gauge the quality of a movie. I remember one nineteen-amen sermon, which set the record for amens in one service. Average amens were about twelve per Sunday.

Christmas church was different from regular Sunday church. The preacher didn't scream as much but instead read from either Luke 2 or the first couple of chapters of Matthew to tell the story that we already knew pretty well anyway. I kind of felt sorry for the preacher at Christmas because you could tell he was trying to make the story interesting so we'd respond more like Mr. Amen than like Mr. Rip Van Winkle. I also think he didn't scream because the whole sermon was about the “baby Jesus” and screaming at a baby just seemed a bit over the top.

For the church Christmas pageant, the kids gathered up bathrobes and broom handles from home and used them to dress up like the shepherds and the wise men. Later I found out that the real wise men in the story were rich big shots, while the shepherds were poor and smelled like their sheep. But in our pageants, they all looked and smelled pretty much the same. Whichever older girl in our church could sit still the longest got to be Mary. She had to pretty much sit in the same spot through the entire pageant and look at the plastic doll in her arms and soak in all the songs that the rest of us were paraded in by age groups to sing. The littlest kids came in first, followed by the kids from each age group until we got to the “big kids” in the sixth grade. They were the oldest ones who had to do the pageant thing. Once past the sixth grade, the teenagers, who didn't think singing “Silent Night” and “Hark the Herald Angels Sing” was cool anymore, pretty much rebelled, so they got to watch like the adults. But there is one truly remarkable thing about those pageants—they packed people in. People who wouldn't have shown up at the church if it had caught fire came to see their own children or their nieces and nephews line up and sing Christmas songs. It was really fun to watch and see which kids would panic when they saw all the people in the audience. They would cry, and their parents would have to come to the front of the church and rescue them. Then there were the kids who loved every minute of it and sang at the top of their lungs and drowned everyone else out. One kid in particular was actually louder than the preacher was when he screamed. And then there was always at least one kid who felt obligated to empty his nose with one of his fingers while performing. All of this to show our love and respect for the birth of the Messiah!

For me, Christmas represented consistency. In a world of uncertainty and confusion, at least one thing held true—Christmas would be celebrated pretty much the same way each year. And of course the whole “birth of Jesus in Bethlehem's manger” story never changed, but it never seemed to bother us that we knew the whole thing from start to finish by heart. We wanted to hear it again—without changes or edits.

Through the years, my traditions have changed as I've aged, moved, and lost and added members of the family, but new practices became traditions as well. After my sister and I grew up, got married, and had our own children, we still usually went to our parents' house on Christmas Eve to open our gifts and celebrate. When we were little we celebrated most of our Christmases on Christmas Eve night because Dad had to work at the fire station on Christmas morning. The fire station is one of those places that doesn't get to close down for the holiday, and in fact, there was almost always a big fire at Christmas because people put up Christmas lights improperly or put a dried-out Christmas tree too close to a fire. We liked this tradition because it meant we got our presents the night before most of our friends did. Our parents told us that Santa made a special trip and came early to our house, and we actually believed it. I think it's one of the reasons that I didn't grow up thinking we were as poor as it turned out we were—I figured if we were important enough to warrant a special early visit from Santa, we must be a pretty big deal around Hope, Arkansas!

One of the toughest adjustments to make after Janet and I married was how to celebrate Christmas. It's difficult for every married couple; how do you combine the traditions of one family with the traditions of another? It might be easier to get Israel and the Palestinians to the peace table than to resolve some of the challenges of merging two very different family rituals into one harmonious Christmas experience.

Since my family traditions were the only ones I knew, I was pretty certain that they were the “right ones.” The thought of doing Christmas differently was obviously blasphemous. If God had wanted us to have ambrosia instead of chocolate pie and crispy chocolate chip cookies as dessert, he would have written that somewhere in the Bible. The only reason explicit instructions about the chocolate pie and chocolate chip cookies were not in the Holy Writ was because everyone already knew that was the official Christmas dessert.

I did my best to hide my irritation that at Janet's house they couldn't start the Christmas dinner without ambrosia. I actually recall someone actually saying, “We can't have Christmas without the ambrosia.” The heck we couldn't! I could have a lifetime of Christmases without it. I couldn't even spell it and didn't really know what it was, and when I finally learned I cared even less. As of this writing, I have been married almost thirty-six years, and I am proud to say that I have never once touched that ambrosia. I'm sure it tastes wonderful, and if it were Easter or Mother's Day, I might try it. But I have my principles!

Have you ever pondered that our traditions take on a heightened sense of certainty and become a part of the “right and wrong” way of the holiday? We tend to think that any of the activities that don't follow the script of what we're used to are not just different but wrong. Morally wrong!

I'm certain that Mary and Joseph missed having some familiar things around them the night Jesus was born. There was nothing to give them a sense of place or comfort. They were about as far removed from familiar things as they could be. Of course, they created the most important Christmas tradition themselves that night, since they were actually creating Christmas. They weren't thinking about pie or cookies, and they sure weren't thinking about ambrosia! That all sounds silly and childish when you think about what Christmas is really about, but I don't think it actually is. We establish traditions to give us connections to our past and a sense of security about the uncertainties of our future.

After both of my parents died, the idea of getting together on Christmas Eve the same old way seemed too much a painful reminder that they weren't there. So Janet and I started doing something totally different. We would attend our church's Christmas Eve service, and then my sister's family and ours would go out to eat Chinese food before gathering at our house for a brief time to observe Christmas. Now what on earth does Chinese food have to do with Christmas? Not a thing, but my dad loved Chinese food, and maybe it was our way of saying that the holiday is both a “sweet and sour” memory of the good times and the fact that our parents aren't with us anymore. Now, having Chinese food on Christmas Eve after our church's special service is as much a tradition as it once was to cut down a cedar tree, make divinity, roast pecans, and watch our dad cuss when he put his finger into the empty light sockets.

Most of our traditions aren't elaborate ones. They don't have to be. They're special because they happen every year, not because they are expensive or complicated. And they make for a very wonderful but a very simple Christmas.

6.

Crisis

My wife Janet and I thought that 1975 was going to be such a good year, but instead it was a series of crises that escalated into the most trying days of our young marriage.

Janet and I were married on May 25, 1974, when we were both just eighteen years old. At the time, I was studying theology and communications at Ouachita Baptist University and had determined that if I loaded up my class schedule each semester and took classes in the summer and in January during the “J Term,” I could earn my four-year degree in two years and three months. That would save a lot of money, which was important, since I was paying for college from my earnings from working at KVRC Radio in Arkadelphia and as a part-time weekend pastor at a tiny little church in town.

We couldn't afford for both of us to be in school at the same time, so after we married, Janet suspended her education after her freshman year and went to work in a local dental office as a dental assistant. The job paid about sixty dollars a week, but between the two of us, we were able to make our forty-dollar-a-month rent payments for the little three-room duplex we occupied and eat very modestly and creatively. Whenever we cooked meat or vegetables, we took the leftovers and added them to an ever-filling Tupperware container that we kept in the freezer. When it got full of leftover hamburger meat, beans, corn, chunks of ham, onion, or whatever else hadn't been consumed, we'd thaw it, put it in a large pot, add tomato sauce, and eat what we affectionately called garbage soup. It was actually quite good and different each time we had it, and it definitely helped cut down on grocery bills. Another of our budget-stretching techniques was to take stale bread crumbs and mix them with milk to make a stuffing that we'd place in pieces of bologna and bake—we called that stuffed Arkansas round steak. To really dress it up, we'd bake it with melted cheese on top.

Life for Janet and me was simple but good. We were young, healthy, and invincible, and we had the entire world ahead of us. So we thought.

In February of 1975, Janet came home from work with pain in her back. We assumed it was the result of her standing on her feet all day, hovering over dental patients next to Dr. James Glass and Dr. Robin Glass, a married pair of dentists who practiced together in Arkadelphia. At her height, maybe it was the standing and bending over that was causing it, but what started out as just back soreness escalated into rather acute pain. Certain positions, even sitting, made it worse, and the normal home remedies like heat packs and aspirin weren't helping.

A visit to a local physician ended with a diagnosis of back strain and a prescription for some muscle relaxers, mild pain medication, and bed rest. The medicine was barely affordable, but the bed rest would have meant no work and no pay, and that combination wasn't a great option for us. We needed the money from both of our incomes to pay for Janet's medicine and our rent. Several weeks of rest when possible and medicine didn't yield any relief.

Some friends from our church recommended chiropractic treatments, so we decided to try them out. The chiropractor we went to was a wonderful man who gave it his best shot but told us after about six weeks of regular treatments that he didn't think he was helping and recommended seeing an orthopedic specialist instead. I appreciated his efforts, but, more important, his honesty. I have used chiropractors for various ailments through the years with great success, but my confidence in them actually started with the one who admitted that he couldn't help Janet instead of continuing to take our money just because he could have.

Our family physician in Arkadelphia suggested hospitalization and traction. It was not an expense we were prepared for, but fortunately we had taken out a health-insurance policy when we married because my dad insisted on it. The policy cost $17.34 a month, which was a lot of money to us then, but it turned out to be a godsend. After a week in the local hospital with no measurable improvement, Janet was referred to an orthopedic surgeon in Little Rock, about seventy-five miles from Arkadelphia. I still remember his confident, almost cocky attitude as he walked in and announced that Janet had a “textbook case” of a ruptured disc in her lower spine. “Textbook,” he said. No ifs, ands, or buts, this was a ruptured disc, and it might improve on its own with extended rest or Janet might have to have surgery to repair it. Neither of the options was very appealing given that both meant more money going out of our pockets and no more coming in. I think it was during this time that I acquired my basic understanding of economics (one that I would later wish the federal government understood): When you have fewer dollars coming in, it's not possible to increase the dollars going out.