A Southern Christmas

I had meant to tell you about Southern Christmases. I thought I would begin by saying the men spent the morning with their wives and the afternoon with their mistresses. But that was later, after we were corrupted by prosperity. Instead, I decided to tell about a Christmas that was long ago, in a time of innocence and war.

Christmases everywhere and in all times are fraught with danger and with sadness. It is the winter equinox. The festivals of all cultures at this time of year are meant to bring light to the darkness of winter. This is what the Jesus story is all about. The birth of hope. If winter comes, can spring be far behind? Or, as the poet Wallace Stevens wrote, “One must have a mind of winter to regard the frost and the boughs of the pine-trees crusted with snow … and not to think of any misery in the sound of the wind….”

I have always had a mind of winter. I have always looked askance at the efforts people make to cheer themselves up. I think this is because I loved the preparations for Christmas so much, when I was a child, that the letdown when it was over was more than I could bear. Later, when I was part of a theater group, the same thing would happen to me at the end of the play. We would be producing Tiny Alice, by Edward Albee, let us say. We would build a fabulous set, rehearse the play 40 times, perform it 10 times, then it would all be over. The curtain would fall, the audience would go home, we would read the reviews, fini.

The Christmases I most vividly remember took place during the Second World War, when my Southern family was living in small towns in the Midwest. My father was an engineer, in charge of building airfields for the Army Air Corps. There was not much stuff in the United States during the Second World War. Most of the rubber and sugar and steel and gasoline and manufactured goods were being used to fight Germany and Japan. Everyone was a conservationist and a recycler. No one would have thought of wasting anything or complaining because there was no sugar. The only new household goods that we acquired for several years were black blinds to pull down during air-raid drills. I was very proud of those blinds and was reasonably sure they would keep my night light from guiding German bombers to Seymour, Indiana, but not certain that they would. I would have felt better if we could have taped them down with adhesive tape.

It was in this atmosphere that my eighth Christmas came. For many weeks secrets were being kept in every corner of our small stucco house. My mother’s beautiful cousin Nell, whose husband had been killed in the war, was staying with us. Across the street our neighbors’ house had a gold star in the window and a black wreath on the door. Their son had died somewhere in Europe. Our next-door neighbors had two sons in the Navy. My brothers and I were the only children on the block.

I was making my older brother, Dooley, a book that had the schedules of all the nightly radio programs glued to the pages along with some cartoons from the Sunday funny papers and a patriotic poem I had written. I was gluing the things to the pages with glue made from flour and water. While it worked well as an adhesive, it sometimes obscured part of the writing. I wasn’t worried. Dooley and I knew the radio schedules by heart anyway. I knew that at six o’clock on Monday night Inner Sanctum would come on, and I could either go on and listen to it and have bad dreams all night, or not listen to it and have dreams about a terrible story I imagined it telling. The theme of the stories was usually along the lines of “murder will out.”

So I was working on my present for Dooley and spending Saturday afternoons shopping at the five-and-ten-cent stores trying to decide what to buy my mother and my baby brother with the small amount of money I had saved from my allowance. I finally bought my mother a tiny little terra-cotta planter made in Mexico. She still has it and keeps it proudly on a shelf beside her leather-bound editions of Shakespeare and Cervantes and Milton.

Dooley was keeping his door locked and giving me knowing looks. He knew it drove me crazy to keep secrets or have secrets kept from me. He knew that by the 22nd of December I would start trying to cut deals with him, offering to tell him what I had for him in exchange for information about what I was going to get. I was pretty sure I didn’t believe in Santa Claus, but my parents were so adamant in their belief that I always began to waver as the time drew near.

The spirit of Christmas was so rich and strong that year, even I was subject to its powers. And with good cause. In the weeks preceding Christmas Eve my mother and my cousin and the women in our neighborhood were preparing a surprise for me that I would remember all my life. In the dark of winter, the darkest months of the Second World War, in the face of their mourning, these women were spending hours every night making me a doll’s wardrobe the likes of which I have never seen since. A wealthy contractor my parents had for dinner one night had sent my father a fabulous doll for me. He had thought I was cute, I suppose, or else he was just as sad and burdened that winter as the rest of the United States. I remember his face the night he ate with us, and the sadness in his hands and eyes as he talked to me. Perhaps I had shown him the book I was making Dooley. Perhaps he liked little messy redheaded girls who never combed their hair and slept with a night light to make up for listening to Inner Sanctum.

Anyway, he had mailed this fabulous doll to my parents to give to me, and my mother and her friends had decided to make a wardrobe for the doll. Out of old clothes they had fashioned a complete wardrobe. There was a light blue coat trimmed with real leopard fur. There was a leopard hat. There was a nightgown with lace and a matching robe. There were knitted slippers and a dark red jersey dress for afternoons. There were aprons and a sunsuit. There were cotton underpants and several petticoats.

The doll had come dressed in a black and white checked taffeta evening dress and silk stockings and evening shoes. She had black hair and black eyes and little breasts and a lovely smile.

The other present I received was a toy washing machine with a wringer. It was an exact model of the one my mother had hooked up in the basement of the stucco house. When she used the machine it was my job to stand by with a broom to knock her down in case she got electrocuted.

At our house the children’s presents from Santa Claus were never wrapped up. They were left beneath our stockings during the night, and as soon as we woke on Christmas morning we would run into the living room to see “what we got.” My family was much too excitable to have a routine that was any more structured than that.

I slept in my room part of the night. Then I slept in between my parents for a while. Then I slept at the foot of Dooley’s bed, a boon that cost me five cents or ten poker chips on ordinary nights. Sometime during that night I may actually have been asleep for a while. As I said, the spirit of Christmas was very powerful that year.

At dawn I ran down the stairs with Dooley right behind me. And there was the doll. She sat on my mother’s slipcovered sofa in all her fabulous beauty. Her wonderful clothes were lying all around her. It was a present for a king’s child. I could not even touch it. I could not even scream. Off to the side was the washing machine.

Dooley was running his hand up and down the barrel of a BB gun and watching me happily. He had known all along. Only eleven years old and he had been able to keep a secret of this magnitude.

My mother appeared with my father and my cousin behind her. I sat down on the floor and began to undress my doll. Off came the evening dress and the stockings and the shoes. On went the underpants, the jersey dress, the coat and hat. Off came the underpants and coat and hat and dress, on went the nightgown and the robe. This went on for half an hour while Dooley cocked and uncocked the BB gun and the baby woke up and was brought into the room and given his toys and my father read the Christmas cards from our distant relatives out loud. My mother went into the kitchen and made scrambled eggs and cinnamon toast with lots of rationed sugar. At ten o’clock I put my doll into a stroller and went to pay calls on the neighbors who had helped make the wardrobe. I strolled my doll from house to house. I went inside and had conversations and ate cookies and examined Christmas trees.

The day wore on into afternoon. My mother and father and the baby went to sleep for a nap. I played with my doll awhile, then I had an idea. I took the toy washing machine down to the basement and set it up beside my mother’s. I filled it with soap and water. I took the new doll clothes and began to stuff them in the washing machine. I was almost finished and was just stuffing in the blue wool coat with the leopard collar when my mother came down the stairs and found me. She began to cry. I had never seen my mother cry except at death, but now she cried like a child. She didn’t get mad. She didn’t yell. She just sat on the stairs and cried. I remember being surprised by all of this. I was completely happy, sitting on the floor with my washing machine full of soapy water. The clothes still looked all right to me. Especially the lace-trimmed robe with rainbows of soap bubbles in the lace.

If my mother had been older or more cynical, she might have said to herself, a typical Christmas afternoon. At least someone didn’t get shot in a hunting accident or get drunk and fall down the stairs. As it was, she used the afternoon the way humans often do. She turned it into a story. By January and February and March, as spring came and the tide of war turned in Germany, the women in the neighborhood began to tell the story. Over their bridge tables and when they met on the sidewalk in the afternoon, they would tell it and dissolve in laughter. The more they told it, the funnier it became. It’s still a pretty good Christmas story.

 

Ellen Gilchrist, winner of the National Book Award for Victory Over Japan, is the author of more than 20 books, including novels, short story collections, essays, poetry, and a memoir. Among her other well-known works are The Anna Papers, Net of Jewels, The Age of Miracles, and I, Rhoda Manning, Go Hunting with My Daddy.

Reprinted by permission of Don Congdon Associates, Inc. © 1994 by Ellen Gilchrist. Originally published in The Washington Post Magazine.

This article is featured in the November/December 2023 issue of The Saturday Evening Post. Subscribe to the magazine for more art, inspiring stories, fiction, humor, and features from our archives.