Imperfect Tidings

This episode of East Texas podcast Pine Curtain Confidential tells the story of holiday traditions and happy memories of imperfect holidays. Centered around two stories of Christmas in rural Angelina County, this holiday Texas podcast episode stitches together archival documentary audio and autobiographic narrative to create a funny, thoughtful multi layered story that resonates. 

Pine Curtain Confidential is produced by artist, writer and folklore enthusiast Stephanie Khattak.

Transcript

Glad Tidings

We didn’t get much fall and winter in Homer, weather-wise. We might have a few flannel shirts and tights days, but would often be sweating by noon. Pine Trees are evergreen, so there wasn’t much fall color and what was there was beautiful, but brief. I can count snowman winters on one hand, with fingers leftover. 

Most of our holiday traditions were carried out in t-shirts while slapping at earth’s most resilient mosquitos.  One Christmas was spent slapping at a resilient wild deer, but that’s another story for another day.

By the end of November, the infamous “Lufkin Rudolph” decorated oil pump was starting to go up; the rival middle school bands were practicing tuneless Christmas carols for the downtown parade, and out in Homer, our moms and aunts were busy crawling around the church attic, dusting off polyester Wise Man and shephard robes and hoping the cardboard angel wings, which looked more like giant teeth, had made it another year. (They always did.) 

For a few years in the mid-80s, we did a living nativity, setting up scenes around the perimeter of the church parking lot and a manger scene in the walkway between the sanctuary and Fellowship Hall. The congregation was bigger then, and even the most casual community member participated. Located on the one main road in and out of Homer and Bald Hill, no one who lived there wanted to risk the FOMO of driving past it every night. There were even people on the roof! 

I was cast as an angel, and my best friends were cast as angels because well, we are and have always been angels. My older friend Missy was allowed to stand on the flat roof between two buildings, but Jana and I were earthbound angels. This just made it easier to take cocoa breaks, going inside from the cold (ish) night air to drink hot chocolate with the old ladies who didn’t have to wear the costumes because they had made them all. 

One such old lady, my great-grandmother Vada, would say “come inside and warm your innards!” There was a decorated tree on the Fellowship Hall stage, they had dimmed the interior lights, and we would sit there in the dark, warming our innards, happy as can be. 

This went on for a few years, and I would look forward to going with my mom and godmother to collect Spanish Moss from their friends’ trees, enough to decorate the top of the stable. Those musty costumes smelled like good times to me. The church had a brand new sound system in 1985, and it piped out carols all season long. Living mere blocks from the church, I heard them so often that I can still remember the pitch, melody and each choral part. 

Over time, we folded in young shepherds who would dance, karate kick and squabble around the fire while awaiting news of the baby Jesus. I was never allowed on the roof. The sound system played on, year after year. 

Grandma Vada, diagnosed with Alzheimers, was a bit dazed at the nativity scene socials in her own final seasons. In photos from those events, she’s there but her eyes aren’t the same. In retrospect, I wonder how much of that happy chaos she understood and what she thought was going on with all those aggressive little shepherds and whispering, cliquish angels. I think she was happy, that is the most important thing. I think she understood that this was a world belonged to her, and that makes me happy.

(Musical Interlude)

One actually chilly evening, in 1986, we were asked to stay for “special activities” after our December church potluck. This type of request could mean anything from an impromptu lip sync contest to a scavenger hunt across town that ended at Baskin Robbins, so anticipation was high. 

The older ladies’ evening activity would be making decorations for a sanctuary Chrismon Tree, An evergreen tree often placed in the chancel of a church during Advent and the Christmas season. The Chrismon tree differs from the traditional Christmas tree in that it "is decorated only with clear lights and Chrismons, or ancient symbols of Christ, made from white and gold material", the latter two being the liturgical colours of the Christmas season. So, the ornaments they made were white felt with gold accents in glitter and metallic studs. This was pre bedazzler, so everything was done by hand. They cut and decorated so many shapes: crowns, trees, doves and other religious symbols so that our church could be festive that following Sunday morning and through the season. 

Too young to be trusted with white felt and glitter, especially after unlimited church desserts - aka chocolate cake, different chocolate cake and a handful of sugar cookies - we were placed at a table far away from our aunties and given tubs of peanut butter, bags of birdseed and pinecones. “Play nice,” said the adults in the room. The subtext being “don’t tar and feather each other with this. But if you do, understand that we will video you and laugh instead of helping.” Our community documentarians seemed to ascribe to the same code of conduct as the Associated Press. Don’t intervene, no matter who is shooting at whom. Or thumping bird seed kernels at their sister, in our case.

For about an hour, we wiped peanut-butter bird seed on the pinecones, small sticks, upside down styrofoam cups and each other. We weren’t allowed within five feet of the white felt. Eventually we were let outside to run free with our creations - sticky, gritty and hyper. We were going to feed some BIRDS! Birds, mom! Birds, Aunt Teri! Mrs Sophie look at my pine cone! Birds are going to eat it! Do you see that cup? It looks like a bell.

At the front of our church property sits a historical marker, a granite church sign and a skinny little evergreen tree, a little over six feet tall. Not quite a Charlie Brown tree, but not exactly from the JCPenney catalog, either. The tree stood slender and tall-ish, a deep, shadowed black against the starry night sky. This was the serving vessel for our grainy creations. And, hopefully the birds would approach it one by one, so as not to bend it to the ground. But it was ours and we were so proud! 

Any reverence that accompanied our giving spirit dissipated as we got closer to the tree.The excitement built to uncontainable proportions and spilled over, a contagion of hyperactivity as each child lost composure one by one. Bird seed ornaments fell to the ground. Peanut buttery pine cones were hurled toward little faces like sticky, scratchy missiles as our small crowd reached a fever pitch.

One twin tackled the other to the ground, where they rolled in the grass and pulled at each others’ ponytails. 

Another kid scaled the historical monument, balanced in a squat on its pointy tip and hollered an off-tune “Jingle Bells” over and over and over...but only the first two sentences. 

It  was fun to pretend that folding chairs were crutches, and a boy had used two of them to hop all the way across the church yard. Overcome by the crowd mentality, he picked up one and hurled it at his mother, laughing maniacally. 

My mom caught this all on video and it makes me laugh and laugh. Especially the part, where around 9 pm, breathless and hyper, smeared with peanut butter, I ran over to her and asked “Hey mom? After we’re done, can they all come to our house to play?” 

The answer was ‘no,’ if you can believe that. 

----

Our bird tree didn’t last long, but the Chrismon Tree still shines in the church sanctuary each season. Most of the women who made those ornaments have long passed, some have recently passed. But I think at this point, they are all gone. Some of the children rocking around the nativity scenes, and rioting around the bird tree are, too. None of us are young anymore.

For a while after I left home, I would attend Christmas Eve service there, and have, over the years, watched it dwindle from a full church to a sparse one. I don’t know what it is like these days, as my feelings have become more complicated and I prefer to spend holidays at my own house.

When we are told to carry the holidays in our heart, we often assume only the good stuff. The perfect gifts given and received; the batch of cookies that came out just right. The devotionals that honor our respective faiths. But hold room in your heart for the other memories, too. It doesn’t matter that they were imperfect; that just makes them easier to remember.