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?