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Becky Parrish Advanced Skincare at Kiki Culture Salon in Bocage 7640 Old Hammond Highway, Baton Rouge, LA
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CountryRoadsMag.com
46
D E C 2 0 // C O U N T R Y R O A D S M A G . C O M
E S S AY
Visions of Christmases Past
NORTH ON U.S. 71, CLIMBING NATIVITY SCENE MOUNTAINS By Ed Cullen
T
his morning, I was social distancing with a cheery chiminea fire in the corner of the patio as news of the presidential election buzzed around like fall bumble bees. In the long memory of Covid aloneness, I was coursing north on U.S. 71 with my young family in a car that went to the great automobile compost heap years ago. Rest in peace, Vega. A celestial name for a lowly auto, the Vega ran and ran, though its cylinders wheezed as we mounted the I-I0 Mississippi River Bridge in second gear, our children urging the family car over the Father of Waters. We were among the working lower income, knew it and didn’t care. We were on our way to the grandparents for Christmas in CENLA. CENLA stands for central Louisiana in a song commissioned in the 1960s by my hometown of Alexandria. “Alexandria, Alexandria, that’s ah my hometown!” The Christmases of my childhood stand out sharply in my recollections as anticipated joys, disappointments, and attempts to reconcile myth with reality. There was the Christmas a box I was sure held a shortwave radio receiver turned out to be a box of jelly a customer had given my father.
Another Christmas, my attention would drift from Monsignor Aloysius Olinger’s sermon to an electric train I imagined climbing a mountain to a nativity scene. The mountain was real. It stood below and to the left of the pulpit, in front of a metal rack of holy candles, at Our Lady of Prompt Succor. I have no idea what frankincense and myrrh smell like. In my olfactory archive, the Wise Men’s gifts to the baby Jesus smell like burning candle wicks and hot wax inside blood red glass jars. There were too many holes in the Christmas story for me. Our parish priests based their homilies on the ecclesiastical calendar. In those days, my go-to religious guys were a Baptist minister who had a Saturday afternoon show on KALB-TV, the eyes and ears of CENLA, and Bishop Fulton J. Sheen who once said, “Hearing nuns’ confessions is like being stoned to death with popcorn.” Sheen was a princely fellow of Shakespearean demeanor who delivered his televised talks— “Life is Worth Living”—from a theater in New York. He was a lovely storyteller who strayed from the party line in such a charming way no one seemed to mind. He wrote and diagrammed beautifully and fast in a clear, intelligent hand on a
