Davison's Doodle

25th Christmas

The clanging of cookie sheets and Christmas music create a soundtrack for the harmony of stories about family, days past, the people who were and were not at Christmas Eve worship, and how long it will take to make the holiday dressing tomorrow.   It is Christmas Eve at my mother-in-law’s house and with my companion, they tear white bread into tiny pieces so it can dry out overnight in preparation for making the coveted “dressing” that is a family delicacy made only twice a year: Thanksgiving and Christmas.  My companion, Lisa, is the only person in the family, other than her mother who knows the recipe and the process.  I’ve listened to the conversation and stories for many years.  This is our 25th Christmas of companionship.

As time goes by we’ve gotten better at it.  The first years were all a learning experience: family traditions, food, and topics to avoid.  The first five Christmas visits at the in-laws I lived by this mantra: “Speak when spoken to, eat anything they put in from of me, and volunteer to wash the dishes.”  My companion is the youngest of three, and I am the oldest of two.  My companion was the second daughter married.  Her old room is just this side of a wall from her parents.  Throughout the years, I’ve learned to appropriately whisper when debriefing the day, and how to walk on squeaky wooden floors at night.  We were on the alternating family plan for holidays, but since my father-in-law’s death in 1997, we’ve mostly made trips to VA for Christmas.  My parents have gifted us this time with little guilt and for that we cannot say, “thank you,” enough.  I can hear my father, now 72, in my head, “Mike, you’ve got to help Lisa’s mom now when you can.  That’s your responsibility.”

Our family traditions are mostly divergent.  My family doesn’t have set meal times, generally, and we have late Christmas lunch rather than dinner.  There is cornbread dressing in Texas and  torn white bread dressing patties (approx 65 for the holiday meal) in Virginia.  There are pinto beans in Texas, smoked turkey, though one year a pheasant that my father shot stood in for turkey.  Lisa was a trooper, until she found a hole and small piece of shot still in the bird.  Luckily, there was ham that year too.  That was the first year that my parents had both a new daughter-in-law and a son-in-law at the Thanksgiving table.  Leftovers the next night are a significant event here in Virginia, right down to making fresh gravy for fresh mash potatoes and opening a new can of cranberry sauce.  Why?  This year, during the leftovers, my mother-in-law said, “I always enjoyed the Christmas meal the second night more because I was not so tired from all the cooking on Christmas day.”  It was hard for me to eat Christmas dinner at her house that first decade of marriage.  I didn’t grow up in a house where the men didn’t help in the kitchen, so watching her cook, with some help from daughters, all Christmas day (beginning with breakfast), fretting over the flavors, the salt, getting the gravy just right and serving it all hot to a dozen people at 5:30 p.m. gave me indigestion.  I’ve realized that through all the fuss and griping it is how she showed and shows love to her family.  The third Christmas I started with an appetizer of Tums and have graduated to Zantac as time has passed.

Children have grown up.  That might be an odd, obvious thing to read.  My companion and I are childfree, so we mark time differently.  My sister’s kids are just now reaching adulthood, with one about to turn 20 and another 17.  I can remember hearing my father tell my sister, “My job as grand-dad is to teach your children to spit and curse, then send them home.”  This was the first year that my sister’s family did not make it to my mom and dad’s house for Thanksgiving.  I know her girls missed Grand Dad’s waffles, Vonnee’s sewing, and just hanging around a house where you can get into just about anything you thought you were big enough to try.  All you have to do is ask.  Lisa’s side of the family has three that are now bringing their spouses home as well as their children, (7 great-grandchildren at last count), and two more, one about to turn 20 and another 16.  At my house, we would take turns opening gifts one person at a time, typically captured on video, while at the in-laws it is more like I remember from my childhood visiting the relatives.  With so many people and packages, it is kind of a free for all mosh pit of paper, ribbon and bows.  With all of the great-grandchildren this year in the house, all age 4 and under, you also had to look where you were walking so not to step on a child.  I almost made it through the night, but near the end, I knocked one over while helping carry presents to a car.  We scared each other!  She was screaming out loud and I inside my head, “Did I just break a child!”  I guess the youth minister is not child-proof.

My companion and I are ministers.  We’ve spent a lot of time in cars and airports around the holidays.  Early in married life, we traveled on Christmas Eve or Christmas Day typically by plane.  People can be a bit jolly on Christmas day even, when the weather is bad.  Airline employees do their best to keep their cool, when the weather or maintenance keeps planes out of the air.  They, too, have family to see when work is done.  Lisa and I often talk about our first Christmas, when we came to Virginia from Texas.  We laugh about it now and say things like, “What were we thinking?”  That first year we drove.  We left after 8pm one Sunday, after a youth group Christmas party that Lisa organized.  We left that night because a snow storm was predicted to hit Virginia.  Fort Worth to Dallas to Texarkana to Little Rock to Memphis to Nashville to Knoxville to Bristol to Wytheville to Radford.  Somewhere between Memphis and Nashville, in the early morning hours, I could not stay awake.  Lisa could not drive a car with a standard transmission (straight drive) in her terms back then, so we slept a few hours at a rest area.   What were we thinking?  Lisa called her parents from a payphone at a McDonalds.  The night we arrived it began snowing, and snowing, and snowing.  That first Christmas we were snowbound much of the time.  This year is was 55 degrees on Christmas day.

David Bowie penned the lyric,
“I watch the ripples change their size
But never leave the stream
Of warm impermanence . . .
Time may change me, but I can’t trace time.”
[Bowie, David. (1971) Changes, On Hunky Dory, London, UK: RCA.]

And, I think of things that have happened around us and to us over 25 Christmases.

• San Francisco/Oakland Earthquake
• Gulf War 1
• We graduated seminary and were ordained into Christian ministry.
• Cell Phones evolved from being carried in a bag that plug into a cigarette lighter to fitting in your jean pocket.
• Lisa’s Mom survived 2 bouts of cancer and a heart attack.
• Michael’s parents sold a house, built a house, retired, sold that house, and moved to a lake front house they had built. It was there they celebrated 50 years of marriage and counting.
• Lisa’s father had a medical emergency one Christmas.
• Desktop Computers became Laptop Computers and iPad and other tablets
• AOL gave way to the full-blown Internet
• Email instead of Snail Mail
• Dialup to broadband. Wired to Wireless.
• Lisa completes her PhD.
• Michael quit smoking a pipe (1997).
• Cassette Player, MP3, iPod
• My sister and brother-in-law became parents (2x)
• Five of the nieces and nephews have been on their high school graduation trips with us.
• Domestic Terrorism: Oklahoma City Bombing
• International Terrorism: 9/11/2001
• War in Iraq and Afghanstan
• You can no longer go to the gate at the airport to meet a deplaning passenger.
• Airport Security: Please remove your shoes, coats, pull out your laptop, and have your 311 bag ready.
• Lisa got the chicken pox. Michael cracked a rib and developed pneumonia.
• SCOTUS decided a Presidential Election.
• POTUS’s: Reagan, George H, Clinton, George W, and Obama
• Women on the SCOTUS and a woman as Secretary of State
• Lisa’s father died.
• My grandparents died.
• We chose to not have children.
• Lisa preached at our denomination’s General Assembly.
• We’ve lived in 5 states.
• Summer Medical Stuff: Lisa gall bladder surgery; Michael stress test and colonoscopy.
• Buy and sell 3 houses.  Live in #4 right now.
• Unintentional landlords for 4 years.
• Michael has baptized 43 people.
• We buy an artificial Christmas tree.
• Michael moved from congregational ministry to regional ministry.
• We’ve been on 8 cruises and vacationed in St Thomas twice in rented houses.
• Lisa officiates at LGBT “holy union services” and now LGBT persons can legally marry in many states.
• We’ve toured in Israel, Turkey, and Greece.
• Lisa published her first book.
• Two economic recessions and one market crash.
• Our Cars: RX7, Chevy Citation, GMC Jimmy, Geo Storm, Camry, Miata, Subaru Outback (2x), VW  Bug TDI, VW Jetta TDI (2x)
• Arabs and Israeli’s still fighting each other.
• Napster, Netflix, Hulu, iTunes, Amazon, Ebay, Paypal, Craigslist, Angies List, & online banking

There are too many persons to begin a list of those that have mentored, influenced, befriended, challenged, and stayed in touch, even as our vocations have moved us around.  We are grateful, lucky, blessed.  There is not a good way to end a reflection on our 25th Christmas. The chapters of our life together, our companionship, have been full, and I can’t imagine it will be any different in the years ahead.  I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine.