This ranching, with all of its ramifications, was not primarily Christmas play. It went on more in the summer than in the winter, but no Christmas toys could compete with it. Certain Christmas books added to prolonged play.
We children always knew positively that there would be books on the Christmas tree or in our stockings. We always wanted particular titles, and we had the before-Christmas pleasure of speculating on what known and unknown books Santa Claus might bring. I don’t remember what Christmas it was that Ivanhoe came to make knights of us boys. Old Stray, an irritatingly gentle horse that could hardly be forced out of a walk, enriched the flowering of our knighthood. Swiss Family Robinson made us into cave-dwellers. We dug our own cave into the bank of Long Hollow, some distance below the house.
I wasn’t yet reading when for Christmas I received an illustrated book, with a linen cover, about an owl that hooted. On demand my father read it aloud over and over. We could hear owls hooting in the live oaks many nights of the year, and my father could talk owl talk. Every time he read the book he had to tell us what the owl says, in words long drawn out from deep down: “I cook for myself. Who cooks for you-all?� There are very few conversationalists to whom I had rather listen than to a hoot owl, and often to this day his lonely and beautiful who-ing takes me back to a Christmas of childhood, to a child’s book, and to my father’s voice.
There were no commercial Santa Clauses in the country, so far as I know. The only Santa Claus for us was my father. At an early age I learned his identity, but that knowledge had no effect on the great illusion, any more than knowing that a grown woman could not literally live in a shoe had on the Mother Goose fact that there was an old woman who lived in a shoe—and she had so many children she didn’t know what to do.
My father cut the Christmas tree out in the pasture—a comely live oak or maybe a “knock-away� (anacahuita)—and brought it in secretly. After it was hung with gifts and lighted with little colored candles and we had all gathered to behold it, Santa Claus would bound in, all in white and red, as cheery in his ruddy complexion, reindeer country manners, other-world talk, and contagious spirits as the Saint Nicholas of “The Night before Christmas.� In disguised voice he called out the names on the packages and added joy to the gift in the way he presented it. Then he would disappear, and presently Papa would come in and claim his own presents with as much eagerness as we had received ours.
“The gift without the giver is bare.� Gifts can be manufactured, some beautiful, many useful, but giving-out feelings can’t be—though they can be cultivated. The love and cheer associated with Christmas will always be the best thing about it. How often just a good word that conveys the word-giver’s generosity of spirit enriches people! I remember the “Merry Christmas, sir!� of a gray-haired woman scrubbing stone steps at a college in Cambridge, England, during the war; and recollection of her sturdy, cheerful, kind nature brightens my world. I can hear my mother’s “Christmas Gift� or “Merry Christmas� as I write these words. Whoever heard her greeting received a gift, for she meant every syllable of it, felt every tone in it.
Sunrise, starlight, silence of dusk are never trite. Generous feelings and cheering words are never trite. Merry Christmas!
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In memory as well as in actuality, Christmas is the time for coming home. Many a father lives for these homecomings of a scattered brood, but it is the mothers who make them. Fay Yauger’s “I Remember� suggests something of almost universal contrast: