Hard Candy Christmases

There used to be a country western song about a Hard Candy Christmas by Dolly Parton.  I looked up the lyrics:

“Fine and dandy
Lord it's like a hard candy Christmas
I'm barely getting through tomorrow
But still I won’t let
Sorrow bring me way down.”

John Bob and I had a few in our lives.  Sometimes it was dealing with the loss of a loved one during the preceding year. Once it was because I was a young wife who didn’t carefully keep up with the checks I’d written, and there was very little money in the bank account.  One of the most memorable times was the Christmas when we’d started our fledgling business, The Medicine Shoppe, and the money we’d put aside to live on until we started making a profit had run out.

Now most of this took place in the far-off days of no Visa cards and an extremely finite bank balance (you know, in the days of horse and buggies and T-Model cars…)  So, when Christmas was drawing near in 1988 and the bank account was very low, I wondered how we would provide a joyful Christmas for our four kids.  I was staying home in those days, working for Sonshine School, and facing the reality that I was going to have to return to work.  I hated the thought of finding daycare for our baby Zach at four years old. I dreaded putting my almost forty-year-old self back on the job market.  And I needed to provide a Christmas for our kids.  (John Bob was working all hours keeping the store open and building a customer base.)

The two older kids, Bekah and John Caleb, had wanted denim jackets.  It must have been a big thing at the time.  My mother-in-law, EO, had given me a huge yardage of denim she’d gotten sometime and never used.  I went to Hancock’s Fabric and found a dollar pattern and just enough cheap pink and red plaid flannel to line two jackets.  While these kids were in school, I carefully sewed the jackets.  I thought they looked pretty good!

  

I haven’t found photos from this year in the Christmas album I put together several years ago.  And that reminds me of the Stone Age days when one took pictures on a roll of film and had them developed at WalMart.  Sometimes I waited a long time to develop a roll/rolls because I knew it would be hard to pay for their printing.  I guess if I took pictures that year, they were never developed.

At Hancock’s, I also found a dollar pattern for a rag doll for six-year-old Caroline.  It had clothes to go with it.  I’d made a bunch of doll clothes for Bekah’s Christmas doll when she was almost five.  Since one of my best childhood Christmases was the year my big sister Ramona had made my bride doll her wedding dress and trousseau, I wanted to make clothes for my daughters’ dolls at least one time.  This rag doll had several outfits.  So, I made two rag dolls and outfits: one for Caroline and one for a family for whom we’d volunteered to help provide Christmas.  It was pure joy finding scraps of cloth to adorn the doll for our daughter!  They turned out wonderfully. Because I’d gone a little overboard on the cheek blusher I was instructed to use on the doll’s face, Caroline named her Rosy.  She slept with her even in high school.

Which left our four-year-old Zach.  I couldn’t think of anything I could make for a little boy.  One day I was rummaging in the attic for something and discovered an unopened toy which I’d bought cheaply when a discount store had gone out of business a couple of years before.  I’d completely forgotten it, but I think the LORD helped me find it. It was a Sesame Street Carnival with Bert and Ernie and Big Bird riding a carnival ride.  Perfect. (He actually enjoyed it more, surreptitiously, when he was a little older and worked all the mechanical parts more easily.)

I don’t remember lots more details about that Christmas.  But, recently, when I heard about a young family having Christmas financial difficulties, I thought how grateful I was to have experienced that year. God helped us to learn what is really important: true gifts are those which come with sacrifice and love.  Isn’t that what every lasting Christmas story describes?

·     God stepped down from heaven and took the form of a baby to bring light and grace to the world.

·     One young woman sacrificed her glorious hair to give a watch fob to her beloved husband; and he sacrificed an heirloom watch to buy a beautiful comb for her glorious hair. (The Gift of the Magi by O. Henry)

·     A young firefighter with five children in a derelict house spent his last dollar to buy a plastic apron for his wife when he received her carefully-saved-for gift of a new dress shirt (without frayed cuffs and collar) because he couldn’t bear not to give his dear wife a gift. (Box Family Christmas story, 1950)

Many years later, a young girl, ready to check out SFA before starting there as a freshman, asked her mom in a whisper to hide Rosy in the quilt her mom was going home to fetch since the college dorms were freezing cold on that hot July day.

Are you surprised that often the gifts I love best at Christmas are the ones I make for my beloveds?

All five of the siblings in front our our Newark home
when Ramona was at Boyd High School

Memories of Mona

One of my earliest memories of my sister Ramona is of her being on the spirit team at Boyd High School in the early 50’s.  The girls all wore green corduroy dresses with gold trim as those were the Boyd Yellow Jacket school colors.  Mona made her own dress, as I imagine the other girls did as well.  She also made me, her little five-year-old sister, a matching dress.  I felt that I was the most precious and loved young sister in our little town.  Our family watched the football games from old wooden bleachers.  At half time, out came our beautiful elder sister with her squad who had a marching and dipping routine very dissimilar to today’s drill teams… and I dipped and marched along the sides enjoying how my green skirt floated and swayed.

Not many years later, when I was in second grade, Mona finished her first year at Texas Women’s University and came home to marry her childhood sweetheart.  By this time we lived in a big white frame house on the east side of Fort Worth.  I was to be the flower girl, and I took my responsibilities most seriously.  Mona, using her meticulous sewing skills, crafted her own wedding dress. Many years later, I made mine as well.  And she also sewed a beautiful red taffeta dress for me.

Her wedding was to be at Christmas time, so it was decided to use red and silver Christmas tinsel to cover the headband on my hair.  Ramona wrapped an old Easter basket with white satin to hold the rose petals. I wore my hair in curlers at school the day of the wedding and loved the novelty of it.  Then, as now, it was straight as a board!

The night before the wedding, our family held the rehearsal dinner in our large old home. Marquita followed Mona’s careful directions in making tuna, shrimp, and cream-filled popovers from recipes in our family cookbook, Ladies Home Companion Cook Book.  They were so good, I used to wonder they were never served anywhere else for festive occasions.  Ramona was already us younger sisters' ideal of a homemaker.

That is my Papa Stem looking on behind my left shoulder.

Then came the evening of December 20, 1957. I was so nervous about how to be a flower girl.  My family remembers that I dropped one rose petal at a time and forgot to smile walking up the chapel aisle. The picture of the event reminds me of the tinsel shining in my hair, the cordovan colored shoes we finally found for me to wear, my taffeta dress, and my serious expression.

The next Christmas in 1958, I asked Santa for a bride doll.  I always asked for a doll at Christmas: sometimes I asked for a baby doll or a young girl doll, or a bride doll.  On that morning, I found a beautiful doll in my stocking with a long white dress. I didn’t realize at first the dress was made of the fabric from which Mona had fashioned her own bride dress.

I had already been checking out my packages under the Christmas tree and realized there was a strange cylindrical package with my name on it.  When we finally started opening our gifts, it was the first one I ripped into. It was an oatmeal box!  The cavity inside was filled with a trousseau of dresses for my doll.  It was from my loving newly married sister, Mona.  She had taken the doll Mom and Dad purchased early and made all kinds of clothes for her. I don’t remember anything else I received that year.

I'm holding my new bride doll and
standing beside my baby sister, Camille.

Not long after, Ramona and Lyndel were sent overseas to Germany for Lyndel’s first deployment in the Air Force.  All of us grieved at their leaving, but I really struggled with it.  We’d studied Holland in social studies, so I begged Ramona to send me wooden shoes.  She promised she would.  I was too young and inexperienced to realize how hard it was for her to leave the familiarity and closeness of family and Texas to venture out to another land and another continent.

She told me later that her salvation from loneliness was in her letters home detailing how she fixed up her little home and including carefully drawn floor plans of the apartment.  We hung over the letters and read them over and over.  And at Christmas a package arrived in the mail with wooden shoes enclosed.  Later I received a tiny Dutch boy and girl and a Swiss doll as well.  I sent her my sixth grade class picture with an inscription on the back:

Mrs. Reynolds Sixth Grade Class at Tandy Elementary, Fort Worth, Texas.

I wrote this on the back of the photo.

She told me recently she cried and cried when she received it, because she was so very lonely at the time.  They used to say Mona was my little mama.  She was a basic part of my sense of worth and later realization of how God loves His children.

Many years have passed. I have sons and daughters.  I look up to my grandmothers and mother and sisters as I choose how to live my life.  I love to cook for my dear ones, sew for the children and grandchildren, decorate my house, search for a bargain, cherish family heirlooms, and follow in their footsteps.

In recent years I have learned to know Ramona as a friend, a fount of knowledge about our family, and my sister in Christ.  She loved my husband’s songs and guitar music.  She and my sister Marquita and I had adventures prowling through antique shops and estate sales.  Family reunions drew us all together with the common bonds of memories and faith.

Ramona has gone on to join my family’s ‘cloud of witnesses’ in heaven.  I grieve her loss as a companion and mentor.  I regret not having asked her more questions.  I am assured that she has gone to a better place at which we will join her by and by.