Country Roads Magazine Hearth & Home Issue

Visions of Christmases Past

NORTH ON U.S. 71, CLIMBING NATIVITY SCENE MOUNTAINS

By Ed Cullen

This 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 chalkboard.

I wanted to believe the Christmas story. Santa Claus was obviously a fraud. The Son of God I held out hope for, but when I looked at the creche clinging to the side of a giant, forested, papier mâché mountain, I saw not the coming of Our Savior but the potential for a Lionel train layout.

All of this comes flooding back in the chilled air of early November. My fingers are stiff with cold. I remedy this by feeding sticks to the fire pot. The air is redolent of perfumed smoke from the kindling I collect from a friend’s woodworking shop. He is an artist who throws his mistakes into the scrap box for me. Beside the firepot, there is a pile of burnable bits and another pile of the artist’s mistakes that I cannot bring myself to burn. Last winter, I rescued a rhino head carved from a dark African wood. This morning’s fire led to the discovery of what looked like an acorn cap discarded by a squirrel the size of an Irish setter.

On those long ago drives north to grandparents and Christmas, we drove what was a major state highway in Louisiana: narrow, lumpy, undulating U.S. 71. The federal highway doubled as the main streets of Cheneyville, Bunkie, and LeCompte, each decked out in Christmas lights. Bunkie’s

department store windows put on their best faces, but the hardware store always beckoned with its garden tools standing at attention out front and pedal cars on the sidewalk, reminding children that they were not all created equal. Off the main track, there was a hotel where people dined, read newspapers in the lobby, and slept in small rooms between crisp sheets. Further down the road, at Lee’s restaurant in LeCompte, there were color-tinted photos in the men’s room of passengers boarding trains.

My children knew presents awaited them at the grandparents’. They vibrated in the back seat in “safety chairs” a parent today would be jailed for using. Those early family Christmas trips home in a small, yellow car were the best present a person could receive—the gift of time out of time.

My gaze was drawn to the tall fence at the bottom of my small back yard where dark, green trees stood before a heartbreaking azure sky. I checked a piece of kindling to make sure it wasn’t something I wanted to put on the mantel, before tossing it into the firepot.

Merry Christmas.