I don’t think I have a picture from any Christmas we spent in my paternal grandparents’ house. Somewhere I know there is one of me and my brother and my two cousins, teenagers, sitting on the couch in the apartment where our grandparents later lived.
Somewhere there is a picture taken in the farmhouse of my grandmother and my aunt, but I don’t think it was taken at Christmas. My grandmother is doing something odd in the picture, reaching her arm over her shoulder, behind her back. I remember the wallpaper, dark and brown. I remember that house viscerally.
This is the side of the family my brother and I don’t know as well. Is everyone’s life divided this way? Is everyone closer to one set of grandparents than the other?
My maternal grandparents lived so nearby; they were a part of our daily lives. My dad’s parents we saw on Christmas Day and maybe two or three other times during the year. Back when my grandfather (PaPaw) was healthy, they would come to visit sometimes in the summer and stay in their orange camper in front of our house. I remember that, but I mostly remember Christmas.
When the farmhouse they lived in burned to the ground, they moved into a trailer near downtown London, then to the apartment building. My grandfather died when I was in college. My grandmother is now in a nursing home.
But once, we were all young.
We had Christmas Eve with my mother’s parents (Too-Too and Bopee), and Christmas Breakfast there as well (fried eggs and country ham and biscuits) before heading out to Laurel County. Some years we opened presents on Christmas Eve, but during most of my childhood we opened them on Christmas morning, then had breakfast, then hurried to the car.
Christmas Day always felt rushed. My dad couldn’t relax until we got to his parents’ house, where I’m sure his family looked forward to seeing us. I only fully understand this now, as an adult. I imagine what it would be like for me to only see my nieces once a year and it would be awful.
I remember the road to their house, the country store we passed on the way and the way the house sat on the land. I knew the stories of the yard. For as little as I was at that house – it is woven into fabric of my memory – the dips in the floor, the light in the bathroom, the rabbit hutches out back, the room where my grandfather talked on his CB radio.
It was a two-hour drive to get there and we made that trip every year. It didn’t matter what the forecast was, didn’t matter how hard it was snowing. We made that trip some years on solid ice, the only car for miles. Back then, most everything was closed on Christmas and hardly anyone was on the interstate on Christmas Day. I rode in the backseat and watched the houses out the window, smoke rising from the chimneys or trash burning on the hillsides.
We opened more presents soon after we arrived. My brother and my cousin Mike always received matching presents as did my cousin Kim and me. Sometimes it was something handmade – crocheted slippers or teddy bears. One year it was clock radios. One year it was giant dolls, as tall as we were.
Christmas dinner was chicken and dumplings (my brother’s favorite), sweet potato casserole with marshmallows on top (my favorite), green beans, rolls, and a punch made with ginger ale and orange sherbet that I’ve never had anywhere else.
And every year, MaMaw made homemade candy – chocolate fudge, peanut butter fudge, peanut butter rolls, and each family received our own box of it – shoeboxes wrapped in aluminum foil. This candy was a crucial element of Christmas for me. This candy, it cannot be overstated, was outrageously delicious.
When we were older, when we were out of high school and my cousin married, MaMaw started making us each our own boxes – a box for every household. I’m a little ashamed to say how thrilled I was to have my own personal box of candy.
There were also molasses cakes, once, cakes built of thin stacked layers. There were jam cakes and dark fruit cakes. There was always food and food and more food and when they lived in the tiny apartment the kitchen heated the whole place up to about five hundred degrees. We ate on TV trays. We ate and ate and what we didn’t eat was sent home with us in margarine tubs.
Bronze baby shoes, praying hands, the portraits in the oval frames, the chair my dad made, the tins of Sir Walter Raleigh, my cousins blonde hair in curls like Shirley Temple, a car race on TV, the hound dogs under the porch of the farmhouse, the lobby of the apartment building – the way the older residents, the ones who wouldn’t have grandchildren visiting, reached out for us.
It was always edging up on dark by the time we headed home. If the roads were slick, my mother would worry. I listened to the radio voices. There was always a sense of relief that Christmas was over. I savored that long night drive everyyear. I watched the headlights, watched the stars, imagined that one of them was brighter than all the others, imagined that it was leading us home.
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