Traditionally Speaking
"I found this little first edition on one of my Saturday morning yard sale 'blood sport' outings. I beat up an old lady and grabbed it out of her hands. I know the story means something special to you, so I wanted you to have it." So reads a dear friend's inscription on the inside cover of Ferrol Sam's book Christmas Gift!, which he had given to me for Christmas. He was right. "Christmas Gift!" remains one of my family's most treasured traditions and each Christmas morning brings the gentle, warm tickle of happy participation in a game that started generations ago in some long forgotten patriarchal giggle-fit. Reading Sams' book swept me back to the magic of Christmas Past, experiencing the holiday as only children in their open-mouthed, wondrous innocence can.
Sams' experience of Christmas was vastly different from mine, his being one of an early 1900's farming family immersed in grandparents, cousins, aunts, and uncles, many of whom had lived in the same house for over six generations of Sams'. His holiday began a week before Christmas with tree chopping expeditions on the property, the fattening and subsequent killing of a forty pound gobbler, and dense seasonal smells permeating the air for days as various pies and dressings were conjured up from the fat, floured hands of the matriarchal clan. It was a Currier and Ives print come to life.
My own memories recall more modern surroundings, a 1950's suburban neighborhood completely bereft of any horse and jingle-bell sleigh or snow-covered fields of choppable cedars and I happily never knew the difference. With relatives spread over the four compass points, my family of four had to create new traditions, as well as sustain established ones particular to the McNellie sensibilities and needs, which we did with great fervor and enthusiasm; the holiday jigsaw to be worked, Dad's country ham and biscuits on Christmas morning, chocolate covered cherries always from "S.C." and the little silver pitcher half-filled with sherry on the dinner table for my grandmother, because she said with a twinkle in her eye, "every one knows that boiled custard needs a little zip." Her custard, as the creamy, yellowish color quickly turned a dim sherry-brown, was for years the source of delighted ribbing, doled out in love and laughter. Christmas dinner failed without that pitcher.
One of my family's most cherished traditions, which due to the mentioned Sams' book, I was surprised to find was not unique to us, is "Christmas Gift!" The truth of its beginning is veiled behind years of retellings, but my father can remember his father doing it with his father and it remains one of those bizarre rituals that are virtually unexplainable to anyone outside of the family.
Apparently, in generations past, when there was no television, Nintendo, or headphones plugged into God knows what, people actually interacted with each other in poignant and meaningful ways, such as beginning inane little holiday traditions. A great- or even great-great grandfather McNellie decided it would be fun to give an extra gift to the first person to yell "Christmas Gift!" to everyone else in the house on Christmas morning. Not only did this begin a long and uplifting tradition I fondly label "chaos of the decibels" between otherwise stable adults and children, it also grew into a deeply competitive and yet honorable exercise. In the beginning it probably was a very innocent interaction; today, it means war. The participants have changed through the years, but the glory has never died. The extra gift became an obsolete trophy; now it's just the principle of the thing that keeps it alive in our hearts. Each year we secretly approach its coming with a renewed sense of cunning purpose. "This will be MY year" we each think to ourselves. "That baby is MINE!"
In an old farmhouse stuffed to the gills with relatives, the tradition seems a more lively, and possibly more meaningful endeavor when all are under one roof. In our suburban situation, with our few relatives experiencing their holiday morning under their own roofs miles or states away, it was reduced to battle by telephone.
My earliest recollection is of my father and his father, Pops, calling each other early on Christmas morning and hurling shouts of "Christmas Gift!" into their respective black, knobby phone receivers. My brother, Theodore and I quickly learned the rules, which basically consisted of trying not to get a wrong number and no calling Pops before the sun rose. For the next twenty years it was a race to see who could "get"Pops first.
Pops was no dummy. He refused to answer the phone with a simple "hello" but would instead insert a resounding "Christmas Gift!" ensuring his success. Of course, this confused any unrelated person who just happened to be calling on other matters, but Pops remained undaunted.
Theodore and I learned ways around this. The trick was to call Pops and scream out the moment we heard an audible click on the other end. But it was chancy - like the time I dialed a wrong number. After shrieking into the phone and laughing victoriously at my sly win, there was nothing but dead silence on the other end. Being eight years old, it took me a few minutes to realize that the silence was not due to Pop's suffering his shameful defeat, but to a complete stranger's wonder as to what asylum patient had gotten access to a phone!
Pops won most of the time, but looking back I know he allowed us more than a few victories. It was a wonderful time in my life and when Pops died, a tremendous void was felt during those first few Chistmases without him. By this time, though, Theodor and I were living on our own and, thankfully, traditions die hard. We started anew with Dad.
Theo and I have proudly raised the next generation of "Christmas Gift" contenders and it has been incredibly gratifying to watch it come full-circle. I found absolute delight in the squeals of my two children as they tried to outwit my dad, their "Papa." Theo's children did the same. Even now, with all of us grown, we still continue the contest, although a few have cheated, trying out the newest technologies like leaving a voicemail at 12:01 in the morning, or sending an email timestamped as close to 12:01 as possible. Of course, this was ruled "foul" by an insulted majority, forcing live voices to be the only true path to victory.
Family traditions, to those who have been lucky enough to be blessed with them, bridge not only the present to the past, but also and more importantly, the present to the present. Each unique custom provides the family members with a sense of "us", like a secret handshake or the knowledge of a password that provides entry into a sacred haven for the chosen few. A deep, unvoiceable sense of attachment, protection, and belonging shudders through the soul as year after year, games of repetitive silliness whose origins are lost in time, bring laughter and hugs to all involved. I feel it bubbling up from my kneecaps every year it happens and I am gratified now to say my children are now beginning to understand, cherish, and protect their own traditions that I made sure were injected into their lives from birth. It bonds them as siblings, it bonds them to me as parent, and it bonds them to their silent, unknown ancestors. Today, Easter Sunday, I have just spent my morning hiding little plastic eggs around the house for my twenty-plus year olds to discover, because they insist that I do so. "It's tradition! Don't think you'll ever get to stop, Mom" they say, smiling with mischief, but also with a seriousness born of need.
The gifts of family tradition are two-fold: one is in the actual doing, the happy camaraderie found in all who are in on "the joke", who share the history from the inside, as no one else can. Traditions are a family bank, and participation is the coin of shared memories, common experience, and silent understandings of ourselves and where we came from, and the first gift is putting our riches in the family account. The second and maybe more important gift, is the drawing on those riches once the tradition is gone, perhaps due to death or some other unforetold separation. Then it's the memories of the tradition and the laughter over a "remember when" evening spent either together or alone, that allows us to revisit each other, to go to the "bank" and withdraw comforting, familial currency. It's a win-win situation all around.
I know that yelling "Christmas Gift!" at sleepy family members is perhaps a silly way for grownups to behave. But for me family traditions, regardless of their apparent lack of logic, perpetuate a wonderful link that bonds ourselves to our parents, our children to ourselves, and I'm so very glad that this family has stubbornly held on. Pops would be proud.
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Quote of the day: I am not universally admired for the bell-like clarity of my diction. Words slide out of me like fat fish. Pat Conroy - "Water is Wide"Chosen because Pat Conroy is master of dipping a sentence in the vat and it coming out Southern. I have spoken to some southerners that even I couldn't understand them. Love this description.
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