Remembering with Thanksgiving

Remembering with Thanksgiving

Until I was thirty years of age, Christmas was spent with my parents and siblings, my grandparents, and five aunts and uncles and many cousins.  We talked loudly and late and started again early in the morning.  We played games, sang (often singing through the main selections of the Messiah), and talked. 

But Christmas Day took special meaning.  We had a Christmas program of our own before we opened presents.  Some things were constant:  We sang carols; Aunt Joy read The Bird’s Christmas Carol; Aunt Libby and Uncle Walt sang Silver Bells; Aunt Jessie read Christmas on the Frontier; the younger children often sang special carols or played a Christmas carol on whatever instrument they were learning; when I was in college as a speech major, I often gave a Christmas reading.   All of us together quoted Luke 2, with the younger ones learning a little bit more every year.  The program often seemed much too long.

The end of the program never varied, and that is the part of the tradition that I miss the most.  Granddad would ask what God had taught us during the year, what we were most grateful for.  The youngest might simply say they were glad they got to come to Grandma and Grandpa’s.  But many times we wound up weeping as we heard what God was doing.  Often we praised, sometimes with weeping then too.

            The years have slipped away.  There is no big gathering anymore.  But for just myself, I want to go back to remembering and thanking God for this past year.

                May your Christmas memories be sweet!

                                                                       

                                                                        ~~Faith Himes Lamb

Christmas Programs Past

 “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, goodwill toward men!” Luke 2:14

 It started right after Thanksgiving.

 "We have less than two months!  Y'all need to learn these parts."  The ladies of the church--those same ladies who organized the Easter egg hunt every spring and dinner-on-the-grounds every summer--got up a Christmas program every December. 

We gathered one evening after supper, blinking at one another in the familiar place so strangely cold on a Monday when the doors would normally be locked and the lights off. 

Our play wasn't just a children's pageant. Everyone got involved.  One year Ronnie McKinney was King Herod, lounging in an old bathrobe, eating grapes in a display of self-indulgence and cruelty as he ordered all babies in Bethlehem killed.   My dad and some other men were the three kings.  A small choir sang as these men---coal miners and mechanics in their modern lives-- walked reverently down the aisle.  With each verse of "We Three Kings," one of them placed a gift at the manger--gold, frankincense, and myrrh.

Sometimes I got to be an angel and wear one of the white robes Aunt  Brookie made.  On the night of the play, it was pinned closed, and the tinsel halo kept in place with bobby pins.   All the tallest girls stood in back while we little ones were perched right out front, smiling at the baby.

The baby Jesus was always someone's favorite doll.  Once or twice a young mother in the church had a real baby of a suitable size, but most of the time it was a stiff plastic doll.  The young mother Mary picked it up and cradled it in her arms, stretching the very limits of credibility to make herself and us imagine the real baby in a manger long ago. 

 

--Sherry Poff