Home for Christmas: A Portrait

Dad sits in his comfy chair, barefoot with his legs stretched out over the ottoman, and he’s laughing, cracking walnuts with a metal nutcracker, putting what shells don’t fall into the chair cushion into the cup of orange peel balancing on the arm. The whole place is nuts.

The four of us are dancing with joy, each of us to his and her own song, my three little sisters and I, like the Peanuts gang before Linus intrudes with his buzzkill religious sobriety, but not like the Peanuts gang because our joy is coming right from the giant nut sitting in his comfy chair, laughing. Bing Crosby or the Chipmunks is the libretto for our merrymaking, that frantic tearing through wrapping paper in which Santa Claus so carefully swaddled our gifts, and labelled in perfect imitation of Mom’s handwriting, even the distinctive German flourishes on the Ds and Ks. He is truly magical.

It had snowed the week before, a lot, and as happens in the mountains of North Carolina, the temperatures had gone up and down around freezing, so that the white Christmas is a crystalline white, rock hard snow, perfect for sledding into the woods below the house. But that will have to wait until after brunch. For now, the rising sun is trying to awaken a sleeping Grandfather Mountain, who is a purple so deep he could only have been colored by a child. He breathes, and smoke wreathes and winds along the hills proceeding from his mighty brow and the bridge of his nose. He is a mighty mountain to oversee a mighty celebration going on behind frosty windows, which is continuing now, as sausage links squeal in the frying pan.

One year it was “Bop-Bop and Rebop,” a weird battery-powered game Dad found, and another year it was “Hungry Hungry Hippos.” Whichever it is this year raises the volume to dangerous decibels, and so Dad, still laughing, and without setting down his nutcracker, saunters over to the record player and turns it up. We squeal with our toys, squealing becoming the rule of the morning from kitchen and living room, meeting in the dining room, where places are being set by us, whenever Mom can wrangle one of us away from the ongoing Christmas carnival.

Sausage links go into the oven to keep them warm while sliced kielbasa takes its turn frying in the pan. Bacon is in the big pan. Eggs will go into the big pan after the bacon is done and warming in the oven. Whatever poverty we suffered through the year has been staved off by a credit card. Dad has invoked the spirit of a relative of his, who visited him in his poverty in the late 1940s, inspecting every year from Nashville where he was a physician, to give gifts to all those children running around in Alabama with only the bare necessities upon body and skin, and those gifts were walnuts and oranges. And something else, I imagine, animating us that very day, thirty-five or forty years later, whatever it was that is making us glad.

And we are eating together, all that Schweinefleisch, Mom’s lips turning bright red so that her snow white cheeks have to take a little color themselves for the overflow of delight. We, the little ones, are still chattering and noisy, which only raises Dad’s spirits further.

I miss my father. I wish he were here so I could tell him I love him and show him the tree I put up in his memory. What a tree! I forgot to tell you about the tree! He knew a family up on a mountain somewhere, a lonely farmhouse perched above a hollow, and in it, characters straight out of a Southern novel. I think they had electricity and running water, but I know it was dark in there, the pot-bellied stove in the main room soaking up all the light and returning heat, the clapboards of the exterior of the house holding forth weathered-gray all around. Its porch floorboards thumped like an army band’s bass drums when boots tramped upon them. Inside was the same laughter my dad had, defiance of poverty, I suppose. We went there at this time every year.

Someone would sweep me up, a frightening old man, perhaps forty, maybe fifty years old, and he would deposit me in the front seat of a dilapidated Ford pickup truck from before WWII. The holes in the floor were so large I was afraid I would slide through and onto the boulders he was trying to navigate among while he and Dad talked over the sounds of the motor and the protesting suspension. Would they even notice if I disappeared? He drove us to the end of the…well, I would say “road,” but it wasn’t a road to begin with, only an impression of a place a vehicle could go, if you talked to it real nice. Once we got to that point, out we tumbled and started searching.

There was a cedar tree somewhere suitable for our house, and Dad would find it; don’t you think otherwise. Indeed, there it was, and then it was in the bed of the truck, and we were going back, and there was hot chocolate on the pot-bellied stove and matriarchal cackling and laughing, and someone struck up a carol, and we sang for a while and we were gone, going down the mountain. Up the tree went into our living room, a gigantic ball of cedar, and dad reached up and cut out the top.

There’s no need for a top because a ball, as you surely know, has no top or bottom, just curvature. That curvature dad filled with everything. If it moved, flashed, blinked, or even flinched, he bought it and shoved it in there somehow. Lights bubbled and spun, ornaments sang and chimed, and when the tree started to show a little droop to its curvature, Dad ran to the Woolworth’s down in town and came back up with an armload of tinsel. The whole tree glistened with stretched polyvinyl chloride. It off-gassed for a while and then settled in to its vocation as pure gaudiness.

I wish he were here because my wife will not allow such a monstrosity into our house, so I’d get to explain to him how I have a little artificial tree in my office because I can’t even find a cedar tree around these parts, not a round one, anyway, and how it is that the tinsel just won’t do because I value my lungs, but look, Dad: bubble lights! Flame lights! I’m sure he’d laugh, and all that anger at him for pushing poverty away with a credit card for thirty years was no way to run a family economy, which featured almost no income, and what income there was was eaten by predatory interest rates until the algorithm decided in 2003 that Dad’s good name was no longer a proper balance for its ever-devouring financial interests, so it demanded Dad liquidate, and he turned his pockets inside out, filed for bankruptcy, and six months later, died of shame. All that anger would melt away, if he were here to see the tree I put up for him.

“The anger and the shame:” he’d say, as he gazed at his heir, “it doesn’t matter, you understand.  All homes disappear. Mine burned down, you know, when my own father died.” That’s right. It did. And he remained after that ever homeless, creating from his own person a home for us. He was home; he became home, which is an impossible task because all homes burn down. They’re all taken by the earth, eventually.

Winter finally came to us this week, up here in Western New York, and I was thinking how much I love it because there is an element of survival attached to winter. Now, I’m no luddite, but I often play make-believe by abandoning technology-rich survival shelters, things such as thermostats attached to high-efficiency natural gas furnaces, and fiberglass insulation, and home wrap, and electric lights, not to mention video games to while away the long, dark hours in. On occasion, I’ll throw on some wool and grab my backpack and a camera, especially when the wind is bringing in the nasty weather, and I’ll photograph the elements, and maybe (but only if it’s not too extreme) camp overnight in a hastily-built ad-hoc lean-to shelter warmed by a big, long-burning fire lay. One night only, I might add. After that it’s a parade of showers, hot tea, and brandy Alexanders to drive out the damp. But there it is: a smallish victory, in a reminder that we are beggars, making homes that will be taken away. To the earth, your mansion is just a lean-to.

The very notion of “home for the holidays” betrays the transience of it. It loops around on itself, as to say, there is a home and there is not home. You go home for the holidays because you must leave home because it is not home. Yet “home” is the second-most sentiment of the holiday season.

When my best friend, Peter, died about five years ago…while he was dying, he once said, “I wish they would fix the English translation of the last line of the Nicene Creed” (we were best friends because we were both sons of bigger-than-life little Lutheran pastors. Twenty years of friendship, eaten alive by gall bladder cancer). I asked him what in the devil he was talking about, so he continued, “It shouldn’t read ‘I look for the resurrection of the dead’ but ‘I look forward to the resurrection of the dead.’” He looked at me, he who was about to join my father amidst the realm of the dead, and he interpreted for me: “There’s a personal expectation in that ‘look’ word. It’s not just a doctrinal statement.”

Indeed, Linus has intruded into the Christmas bacchanal once again, that killjoy. Even so, my father believed his witness, though he had come to faith long before Linus gave his soliloquy penetrating the veil of American tinsel, and Linus (Sparky’s alter ego, right?) believed the witness of Luke, and Luke believed the witness of Mary, the mother of God, and she believed the witness of the Angel Gabriel, who stands in the presence of God.

And so, because I believe the witness of Dad, I say that my father is not dead. He, like Elvis, just went home. It is, most assuredly, a place filled with nuts.