A Simple Christmas (9 page)

In addition to celebrating the Elder family Christmas party in a room more crowded than the mosh pit at a Whitesnake concert and more smoke filled than the inside of a California wildfire, I had to put up with adults doing embarrassingly strange things either to get or to avoid attention. Looking back, I don't think anyone was normal.

First there was my grandmother, Eva Whitney Elder Garner. She was born a Whitney, married and widowed by an Elder, and married and abandoned or divorced (we're not sure which) by a Garner. The thing that distinguished my maternal grandmother was the fact that she had lost one eye as a young woman, supposedly by looking at the sun. She never bothered to get a glass eye or anything cosmetic such as a simple patch—she just had one good eye and one that just wasn't there. Her appearance scared little kids at first sight, but we were all used to it. The only thing more pronounced about her than her eye was her voice. It was loud. My cousin Sandy had dubbed her Go-Go, which stuck, because he said all she did was “go, go, go.” So that's we called our grandma. Not “Grandma,” “Granny,” “Big Mama,” or anything remotely normal for a grandparent. She was “Go-Go.”

Go-Go couldn't see, and her sister, our aunt Mary, couldn't hear. Aunt Mary wasn't totally deaf, but it might have been better if she had been. She
thought
she could hear, so the rest of us had to scream at the top of our lungs to get through to her, and even then she might hear sounds but not necessarily understand them. And because she couldn't hear, she assumed we couldn't either, so she screamed as loudly to us as we did to her. When Aunt Mary was around, the house was louder than any concert Aerosmith ever played.

My sister and I were the oldest of the grandkids, so that meant we were assigned the duty of helping watch our younger cousins as they destroyed the house and all our toys while the adults indulged in nicotine and Maxwell House coffee, which was always kept cooking in the old-fashioned stainless-steel percolator. It was a darned good thing that we were apt to get some new toys at Christmas because the ones we had took a beating from the not-so-gentle handling of our cousins.

Cheap Kodak black-and-white Brownie cameras with those onetime-use, hot-to-the-touch flashbulbs were going off constantly in an effort to record these wonderful moments together so we could one day look back on them with fondness. The food was phenomenal, and I later came to realize that back then in the deep, impoverished South, there may not have been new cars or nice homes, but by gosh, there was great food. Each family who piled in for the event had a special and traditional item they brought to the gathering. I could always count on Aunt Mary to bring her “famous” popcorn balls. I'm sure you've heard about those popcorn balls—she always claimed they were her “famous” version, after all. I'm not sure what made them famous or who outside our immediate family ever tried them, but no matter, they were famous in our house.

My mother's sister Elsie rivaled my mother as an excellent cook, and the Elder family events were generally held at our house, hers, or Go-Go's. As small as Elsie's and our houses were, they were palatial compared to the tiny two-bedroom cottage that my grandmother occupied. Think college frat boys crammed in a phone booth and you've got an accurate picture of Go-Go's house at Christmas. Elsie made great vegetables, which she took from her own garden and canned in the summer, and some killer fudge. My mother would make chicken, roast beef, and corn bread so good that to this day, I feel completely ripped off when I'm served corn bread anywhere else. My mother's was all from scratch, and she never used a recipe but was still somehow always consistent.

Because there were so many of us and none of us were affluent enough to afford gifts for everyone, the tradition was to draw names from a bowl to determine who you would buy a gift for. Kids drew kids' names and adults drew adults' names. I wasn't concerned with the name I drew, since our parents would get the gift anyway, but I watched with intensity to see who drew my name, because that would determine if I had something to look forward to for next Christmas or not—some of the cousins were known to bring really worthless trinkets that wouldn't last through the Christmas party. I even tried to find a way to rig the drawing, which I never figured out how to do. I think it's one of the reasons I became a Republican instead of a Democrat; I just wasn't able to get the whole ballot-box-stuffing, election-fraud game mastered.

There were advantages and disadvantages to hosting the Elder family party. The advantage of staying at home was that we didn't have to be cramped up in Go-Go's house, which was like trying to fit the entire Kennedy clan in a nineteen-foot RV, or drive to the country, where Elsie lived, where we would be forced to stay until my parents were finally worn out and ready to go home. Another advantage of having it at our house was that we'd have more leftover food, I knew the places I could hide to get away from people or the never-ending cigarette smoke, and I wouldn't fall asleep on the way home only to be rudely awakened and have to stagger into the house and fall asleep all over again.

The main disadvantage of making our house the “scene of the crime” was that my cousins would ruthlessly test every last one of my toys to the limits of their durability and leave a trail of clutter and mayhem that I would have to clean up. I tried to avoid this by hiding stuff I really cared about and leaving out only what I thought was indestructible. The other disadvantage was that we couldn't just pack up and leave when we wanted to and had to wait until everyone ate themselves into a sugar-coated and caffeine-induced stupor and had the good sense to leave.

Some in the family had to travel from places like Fort Worth, Texas, or Ohio (or wherever the air force had stationed my aunt Vena's husband, Roger), but the rest were from around Hope, so the only person we usually had to accommodate for the night was Uncle Garvin. Pat and I loved him, and he never played with or broke our toys, so it was a good deal all the way.

My aunt Louise was married to Jack Casey, and they lived in Texas, where he was from. He scared the living daylights out of me because he was a giant of a man—probably six foot six in a day when tall men were maybe five foot ten. He was tall and big and a stern disciplinarian. My parents were pretty strict too, but they weren't so tall that they had to literally duck to go through a door, like he did, so they weren't as intimidating. Because Uncle Jack and Aunt Louise's three kids were closest in age to my sister and me, we probably played with them most and were closest to them even though we saw them only at Christmas and sometimes Easter. As fierce and imposing as Uncle Jack was, Aunt Louise was soft-spoken, even tempered, and ever so calm. When Janet and I married and later lived in Fort Worth, we were able to see the Caseys more often, and I was amazed by how tame Uncle Jack was. Maybe as a child I thought he was the giant from “Jack and the Beanstalk” or the guy who David had to take down with a sling, but it turned out he was the “gentle giant” after all.

My aunt Elsie and her husband Alvin presented the most interesting of family connections. She was my mother's sister, but her husband was Alvin Huckabee, my dad's cousin. His dad and my grandfather were brothers. It gets worse—his mother and my grandmother were sisters. Unravel the string in all this and no one actually married a sister or even a cousin, but it was about as close as a bloodline could get without dipping into a very shallow gene pool. In the old days, when people in my grandparents' day were “courting,” there was usually only one horse-driven wagon per family. When one of the males went to see a female, the siblings rode along and could choose someone from the same farm to date if they wanted—quite a limited selection! There were no cell phones then, and most of my relatives didn't own cars until the 1930s or later, so we ended up with some close calls on genetic separation. That meant that my cousin Sandy Carl and his sister Cindy are my first, double second, and third cousins. Make fun of me if you want to, but if I ever need someone to donate a kidney to me, just think of the possibilities of a genetic match!

There was also my aunt Emilie and her husband Leon, whom we liked because he was a cop and would put handcuffs on us so we could see what they felt like (not too pleasant, actually). Given the notorious stories of our ancestors, I suppose there was some part of us that figured we needed to get used to the feel just in case we repeated history!

The youngest of the Elder offspring was Uncle Junior. He was actually William Thomas Elder Jr., which sounded more distinguished, but I wasn't aware that he had a name other than “Junior” until I was in high school. He had served briefly in the Marine Corps and had played drums in the high-school band but never graduated.

Since my mother was the oldest, after she finished high school, she went straight to work to help provide for the family. This was especially important at that time because her father was dying and leaving them with more needs and fewer resources. Three of my aunts, Louise, Elsie, and Emilie, were able to do what my mother wanted but never got to do—go to college. Louise and Elsie were both schoolteachers, and Emilie worked in a law office.

Christmas on the Huckabee side of the family was much less complicated. My dad had only one sister, and she was fifteen years younger than him. My paternal grandparents lived directly across the street from us, so we saw them every day. My great-grandfather was Lucious Huckabee—a name I'd never heard before, nor have I ever heard it since, considering probably no one ever thought to name their kid after him. He was most charitably described as a “rascal.” That was just a nicer way of saying that he was a woman-chasing, heavy-drinking, hard-living, and hot-tempered old man who had succeeded in alienating himself from all of his children during the course of his lifetime. That didn't seem to affect his health, however, as he lived to be more than a hundred years old. I tried to hide this story from my children out of fear that they might assume that the path to longevity is drinking, fighting, cussing, smoking, and abandoning one's family responsibilities. I met him on several occasions, but my memories of him are limited and not especially fond. My grandfather never spoke of him—ever. He and my grandfather had it out when my grandfather was a young man, and as soon as my grandfather was old enough, he ran away, joined the navy, and served on a destroyer during World War I. After he came home from the navy, he went to work at the Hope Brick Works, where he worked until his retirement. His was a simple life—he worked eighty hours a week (at least six days a week) and due to stomach ulcers ate only green pea soup and saltines. I mean, literally, that's what he ate every day, except at breakfast, when he ate Grape-Nuts cereal. He worked in a hot and sweaty environment, baking bricks and doing a lot of heavy lifting and hard “he-man” work. He always smelled like a combination of green pea soup and Absorbine Jr., a rub-on potion that was supposed to ease the soreness in his overused muscles. The only other medicine he believed in was a combination of WD-40 and Dr. Tichenor's. Dr. Tichenor's was an “old school” all-purpose elixir that was actually nothing but alcohol and strong peppermint oil, but my grandfather swore by both. He used the WD-40 on his elbows and knees as a “joint lubricant” and believed that it was much better than any other painkiller on the market.

Because so many of the Huckabees were estranged from my great-grandfather, and my grandfather and grandmother only had two kids, Christmas on that side of the family was much easier. A few gifts to open with a small gathering of the immediate family was about all there was to the Huckabee Christmas.

As the years went by, families grew and scattered, life became more complicated, and the older relatives died off, the annual Christmas gatherings of the Elder family ended. At the time, I was glad because it meant fewer broken toys and tobacco-puffing adults filling up a house telling the same old, tired stories about their childhood that everyone had heard a million times. But now I realize that had it not been for those evenings of storytelling and embellishing the tales of our ancestors, we would have had no real connection to who we were, where we had come from, and what made us the way we were. I'm sure that somewhere there are sociologists and anthropologists who might find deeper meaning in all of those stories and the people behind them. Those stories helped me understand a vital truth about who I was. As the prophet Isaiah said, “Look to the rock from which you were hewn; to the quarry from which you were dug.” As my dad warned, there are things in that family tree I didn't need (or want) to see, and I have always hoped that others wouldn't see them either, but there are more things I'm happy to see, and in recent years, I've found myself looking for them more and more. Life then was not complicated by Xboxes, laptops, iPhones, or security checks at airports. In fact, there was no airport issue for me then, because I never imagined that I'd ever get to fly on a plane, much less live on one, which is more or less what I do now.

Back then we traveled by car, except for my Uncle Garvin, who came by bus. As the little house got increasingly crowded and the noise level increased, there was no irritation or sense of disruption, but rather a sense that this was what Christmas was all about. We weren't distracted by video games, the Internet, or high-def TV. Besides, the stories from our family were a lot more entertaining than anything on TV, especially back then, and instead of three channels, we had dozens of relatives to choose from who were more than happy to regale us with tales of yesteryear.

Life was pretty simple. It was just about family, mostly. And the family Christmas. Then, life was simple. The family wasn't, but Christmas was. Christmas might have seemed like a hassle back then—with the loud relatives, destructive cousins, and constant cigarette smoke, but looking back on it, I appreciate how genuine it was. Sure, my family may have been a bit complicated, but the Christmas was always simple.