Christmases Past at the Brown House

Every Christmas, from the time I was born until my grandfather died when I was about eighteen, my mother's side of the family always got together at my grandparents' house in Tifton, Ga. To me, Christmas wasn't Christmas until then. Since that period of my life has ended, Christmas, for me. has never been the same. What made those get togethers special, I believe, more than anything else was the presence of my granddad. He was, as anyone who knew him could attest to, one of the most original people ever. He was well known in Tifton, and almost anyone who knew him described as quite a character, but also one of the kindest, most humorous, gentlest people they'd ever known. He seemed to relish the Christmas season.

One Christmas, he got his picture in the Tifton newspaper when he sat up a giant blow-up Santa Claus in a helicopter on his roof. Another year, I vaguely remember him dressing up in a Santa Claus suit and greeting me at the door when I arrived there with my mom and dad. That was a wondrous and confusing experience for me because I had no idea that it was my granddad under the suit, and in spite of the thrill of meeting Santa, I wondered where he had gone when I stepped in the house. When I learned later that it hadn't been the real Santa at all, but only my granddad playing the part, I seriously wondered if maybe Granddad was the real Santa after all. To me, they seemed to possess the same qualities.

On yet another Christmas, when I was five or six, he wrapped up a pair of shiny, white tap dance shoes for me. He told me I should put them on and begin practicing immediately because it was something that not many people could do. If I learned to tap dance, I'd be on the road to being rich and famous. Tap dancing was not something I was even remotely interested in, and I turned up my nose to them. For years and years, they sat unworn at the back of my closet. Writing this now, I wonder what would have happened if I'd taken him up on his offer. Maybe life as I know it would have been completely different.

Granny B. also made Christamases in Tifton special. She was actually my step-grandmother who my granddad married a few years after my mother's mother died. They got married the same year I was born. She was a retired school principal, and it was easy to see that side of her. She was as disciplined, refined, and exact a woman as you could ever hope to meet, but also equally sweet and kind. She treated all of us as if we were her family by blood.

For years, she always let the children in the family open a small gift upon our arrival to take the edge off our giddy anticipation of opening the real presents under the tree. One Christmas, I opened my introductory present with great anticipation to discover that it was a small wind-up turtle. From my expression, Granny B. could tell I was less than impressed with this gift, and being eleven years old, I didn't hold my tongue about it. "All it does is crawl," I said. "Shouldn't it do something more fun than just that?"

Every year after, Granny B., who always called me her "Junebug", told this story as if it were one of the most amusing incidents she'd ever witnessed. Granny B. lived into her nineties, outliving my Granddad by ten years or so, and she always displayed a commonsense, positive attitude towards life. I've always considered her and my granddad to be two of the best people I've ever known, and Christmas brought out the best in them.

My mother's two twin sisters, Gay and Kay were also there at Christmas. They were only sixteen years old when I was born, and they always made a huge fuss over me. For the first six years of my life, I was the only child present at these gatherings, and naturally the recipient of all the toys and attention. Gay and Kay were definitely two of my favorite people. They both had long, very straight, very blonde hair, and vivacious personalities. They always made me feel like the center of the Universe, and they tended to hold adult conversations in my presence. Flattered by their non-condescension, I always hung on their every word.

Even after my sister was born and my aunts got married and had children of their own, Christmas in Tifton continued to seem like the real Christmas to me. There was nothing really special about what we did there. All the usual things: dinner, presents, and singing Christmas carols in most years. It was just the feeling I had when I was there. To me, everyone always seemed so happy and enthusiastic at those gatherings. I don't ever remember any family squabbles or tension. Everyone seemed to genuinely like each other. It always seemed to be everything Christmas should be about.


But those days are over now. My grandfather and Granny B. both died over ten years ago and strangers have been living in the house they owned for just as long. Sometimes when I drive through Tifton, I go by their former house for old times' sake. It still seems wrong to me that people besides them should be living there. My grandparents are also not the only ones who are gone. My mother's side of the family seems to be unfairly singled out for tragedy as if they were cursed by some ancient gypsy. My mother died of breast cancer like her mother when she was thirty-six, and her twin sister Kay died of the same disease two years earlier when she was thirty-two. My granddad, who probably died of heartbreak as much as anything, passed away sitting in his house in his favorite recliner a little over a year after my mother died. All the deaths effectively ended Magical Christmases at the Browns' house forever.

But the last Christmas before Granny B. passed, she told all of us who were left that she really wanted the family to continue to get together at Christmas after she was gone. I think it's a testament to how much we  respected her that that has actually happened every Christmas since although we rarely speak to one another the rest of the year. In recent years, the reunions have seemed much more awkward than magical, and I sometimes wonder if there's any point to it at all.

It makes me sad to think about how much has changed about Christmas for me since I was young, and sometimes I think one of the main reasons I'd like to have children is to have the opportunity to make it magical again. When I was a child, I took those gatherings for granted and assumed the holiday would always seem as unthinkingly wonderful as I considered it to be then. But time marches forward and, at least in my case, cynicism follows. I've come to think that Christmas is really just an arbitrarily set date when we're also supposed to be joyously happy and go out and buy stuff for others and ourselves that will be set aside and forgotten once the new has worn off.

But when I was a kid who believed in Santa Claus and feeling all the Christmas joy and love in the world at my grandparents' house in Tifton, I didn't think that way, and sometimes I think that's a shame.