Our family’s celebration of the Nativity echoes as one of the happiest components of my otherwise emotionally patchwork childhood.
Not so much our immediate-family Christmases with Mom and Dad and my sibs, which were typically suburban; no, it’s the Christmas excursions to our grandparents’ homes that resonate in my memory.
My two sets of grandparents could not have been more different; nor could their homes have been, nor the manner in which Christmas unfolded, when we traveled to see them over the holidays.
On my dad’s side, there was Piqua, that nondescript intersection of two state roads along the Licking River, five miles shy of the equally nondescript Mt. Olivet – vicinity of the ancestral family farm, 92 acres of land where once grew cows and chickens and frogs and today grows tobacco. It is unquestionably a Depression-era domicile, a humble country home fronting a hilly but lush tract of farmland, warm and homey within despite its ramshackle façade.
Inside – the smell of a fresh-cut tree, which my grandfather had harvested himself and propped up in the piano room beyond the living room, where we would gather for gift exchange; my grandmother’s wonderful Christmas meals, usually featuring a country ham; snow cream, spontaneously created by us kids with Grandma’s guidance, the correct measures of sugar and vanilla sloppily applied.
The lo-tech trappings of Northern Kentucky Christmas were augmented by Grandpa’s scripture readings, recitations that fell awkwardly on our young suburban ears; crafts Grandma had cobbled together, strewn through the house for folksy atmosphere; and astonishing midnight skies, blazing down at us in the open grass court to the side of the farmhouse where we’d go out into the snowy darkness to gather snow cream raw materials and look up at a glorious Milky Way, unfettered by the ruddy lights of southern Lexington and northern Cincinnati, too distant to intrude.
That farmhouse was utterly alien, in side-by-side comparison to our suburban realities in Lexington, East Point, Crawfordsville, and Frankfort; to a stranger unacquainted with the history, it might have suggested poverty, conveying little of the richness that resided there, despite everything. It was a greater constant in our lives than any of our suburban stops ever had a chance to become – more than all of them combined, it said home...
And farther north, in Columbus – where my mother’s parents occupied a comfy, pre-war suburban two-story home with a workshop basement – there was an altogether different Christmas experience.
My maternal grandparents could not have been more different from my Northern Kentucky grandparents. The latter were as country as could be, while the former were utterly city folk. My dad’s dad had been a farmer, while my mom’s dad had been a factory worker; both of their mothers were homemakers, with very different styles.
The opposites continued; while my dad’s dad was outspoken and social, my mom’s dad was quiet and reserved; where my dad’s mom was passive, my mom’s mom – whom I named “Mom-Mom” - was effervescent and even, at times, exuberant. Where my dad’s parents’ modest home was packed with comfortable country clutter and the functionality of necessity, my mom’s parents’ home was the epitome of order and charming décor and a humble elegance, reflecting its matron’s inner sense of familial warmth and a love of quality craft.
And Christmas! On the Northern Kentucky farm, the treat was snow cream we made ourselves after Grandma’s country ham Christmas dinner; in Columbus, it was fresh-baked cookies and gingerbread and eggnog. And where the lo-tech farm tree had been home-grown and hand-cut on the farm by my Grandpa, the Columbus tree was utterly futuristic – a rotating aluminum Christmas tree (the height of pop-Sixties techno-hubris) assembled by Grandpa John, with a slowly-rotating color wheel illuminating it, throwing glorious streaks of red and green and yellow and blue and orange and purple all around the room (it was more glorious still when all the other lights in the room were out).
In Piqua, Grandma was the cook; in Columbus, it was Grandpa John, an old-school son of German immigrants with a knack for Italian cuisine. In Piqua, a pot-bellied stove sat beneath a 2x4 shelf supporting coffee cans of knick-knack memorabilia; in Columbus, it was an oak mantle over a fireplace, with a beautiful wood-and-brass clock.
Where Grandpa Robinson stumbled through Christmas scripture, Grandpa John perennially offered a reading of ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas – a tradition I have continued with my own children (and grandson) to this day, almost 40 years since his passing.
Piqua and Columbus could not have been more different; and yet they were the same – far more home to us than wherever we happened to be living at the time, in Dad’s endless carom from church to church. They could not have been more different, yet they were equally familiar, equally precious to us kids. They were our lifeline in our uncertain and more-than-a-little precarious childhood journey.
Mom-Mom died in 1976, and from that point on, Grandpa John celebrated Christmas with us in Frankfort; he passed in 1981. Grandpa Robinson died in 1984, and that was the end of Piqua; Grandma lived another 30 years, but there were no more holidays at the farm.
Why is he telling us this?
I’m telling you this for a reason neither of my parents would particularly appreciate, but in my mind, they really should: none of the Christmas joy I’m sharing right now had anything whatsoever to do with Christ, in my mind or my memories.
It was a joy much deeper, much more permanent, much more real: it was all about family...
Comments