Today we continue our Holiday Season Extravaganza.  Between now and December 25, we will share what it means to celebrate the holidays — Life in Pencil style.

Posted by Elizabeth

One Christmas morning, when I was a teenager, I crept downstairs to begin the revelry of gift-opening, ready to embrace the energy and excitement that a household of new things brings.  Freshly-brewed coffee, mixed with the lingering scent of Lark cigarettes and the yeasty smell of sweet rolls, filled the air; I knew my mom was up, too.  As I tiptoed into the kitchen I found her standing at the sink, holding a teacup in one hand and a dishrag in the other, her cheap Sony radio softly humming, tears streaming down her cheeks.  She was not a person prone to emotion – I could count on one hand the number of times I’d seen her cry – which caused me to be worried and immediately ask, “What’s wrong?”  She turned to me and smiled wanly.  “Nothing,” she said.  “I’m just listening to this story on the radio.  It’s so beautiful, so sad.”

I took a seat at the kitchen table and listened to the end of The Christmas Story, John Henry Faulk’s short essay that NPR airs at least once a season.   It didn’t strike me as particularly beautiful or sad: a raggedy boy meets the author on a country lane and relays his story of an unexpected Christmas.  When the story was over, my mom snapped off the radio and we returned to our suburban Christmas, the story quickly forgotten.  At least for me.  Looking back, I suspect that story played at the corners of my mother’s mind all day, rewinding the details as we tore into shiny paper, turned boxes over and over in our hands, and cut into roast beef with real silver.

Years passed before I thought of the story again, my mom long gone when I happened to hear it aired one cold December day.  It had been so long that I only vaguely recalled the story, the mention of a simple orange and stripety candy gently shaking my memory awake.  The story had left little impression on me as a self-centered teenager (is there any other kind?), but as an adult I found myself wiping away tears with back of my palm, just as my mother had.  Here are the opening lines:

The day after Christmas a number of years ago, I was driving down a country road in Texas. And it was a bitter cold, cold morning. And walking ahead of me on the gravel road was a little bare-footed boy with non-descript ragged overalls and a makeshift sleeved sweater tied around his little ears. I stopped and picked him up. Looked like he was about 12 years old and his little feet were blue with the cold. He was carrying an orange.

And he got in and had the brightest blue eyes one ever saw. And he turned a bright smile on my face and says, “I’m-a going down the road about two miles to my cousins. I want to show him my orange old Santa Claus brought me.” But I wasn’t going to mention Christmas to him because I figured he came from a family — the kind that don’t have Christmas. But he brought it up himself. He said, “Did old Santa Claus come to see you, Mister?” And I said, “Yes. We had a real nice Christmas at our house and I hope you had the same.” He paused for a moment, looked at me. And then with all the sincerity in the world said, “Mister, we had the wonderfulest Christmas in the United States down to our place.

As it turns out, the story is both beautiful and sad.  Santa Claus arrives in the form of a social worker who delivers packages of everyday items that most of us would easily pass over, but are untold treasures to this impoverished rural community:  real coffee, exotic nuts (“not just peanuts”), fresh chickens, oranges.  The Christmas table, laden with their bounty, is fashioned from a board slung over two saw horses and dressed with a sheet.  In every detail of this story, Christmas is the unbridled expression of life’s simplest pleasures.  Despite being faced with abject poverty, the story sighs with gratitude.  Sam Jackson, the boy’s neighbor, says grace by uttering heavenward, “”Lord, I hope you having as nice a Christmas up there with your angels as we’re having down here because it sure is Christmastime down here. And I just wanted to say Merry Christmas to you, Lord.”  Is there anything more sad – and more beautiful – than saying “thanks” when life’s circumstances feel the furthest thing from something worthy of gratitude?

We all know that doing without helps us to appreciate what we have; it’s why the little boy in the story clutches his humble orange so fiercely.  But how do we invite gratitude into our lives when we are fortunate enough to not have to do without?   How do we dig down deep into that soul-place where thankfulness lives?  How do we truly access authentic appreciation?  I don’t have any easy answers, but I suspect it has something to do with having less, thereby allowing us to focus more intently on what little is left over; that’s when the orange takes on special meaning.  And that is the rub of living with less when we have so much at our disposal: it becomes a conscious choice, not one of necessity, and that’s not an easy choice to make.  But in a season when my best intentions to live simply are distracted by twinkly lights that hypnotize me into a retail coma, when the “you need these” nip furiously at my heels, when the things I can easily say “no” to the rest of the year suddenly feel like life’s greatest necessity, I am reminded of this:  the luxury of an orange, the decadence of stripety candy, and the pleasure of a fresh chicken.

I’ll never know why that story affected my mother so.  Perhaps it reminded her of her own raggedy roots, a grandmother who struggled out of poverty in rural Kentucky, a life from which she was far removed and yet so close.  Maybe she was feeling like I am:  so full and so empty, having so much and yet so little.  Or maybe it reminded her that life’s simple pleasures are right at our fingertips, perhaps even more so this time of year, if we amble down the right country lane.

If you want to reconnect with the beautiful simplicity of the season, I encourage you to listen to John Henry Faulk’s The Christmas Story here.  It’s only 10 minutes long.  But first, grab a box of Kleenex.

And if you’re looking for a laugh, my personal favorite seasonal NPR airing is David Sedaris’ Santaland Diaries, which you can listen to here.  If you’ve never heard Sedaris’ reading of his experience as a Macy’s Santaland Elf, the story that shot him to fame, you’ll need that box of Kleenex again, but this time for tears of laughter.