Here, in Tucson, our family tradition is strong. My first Christmases were spent at my great-grandmother Blanch’s house. Her husband, Ray Derby, had died a few months before I was born. I can still remember that the family would sing Christmas songs from sheet music in a great room near the staircase which led to the second story of “The House on Yakima Avenue.” That house is now a bed and breakfast.
My next many Christmases were celebrated at my grandmother Carolyn’s house. She is 87 years old now, and she lives there still. Yakima was an advantageous location for family to meet. The Derbys came over from New York in the 1920’s. Each of my grandmother’s two sisters have extensive families of their own. At some point in the holiday we would go to aunt Pat’s house, play with her Barbie dolls and eat her home-made fudge. It was in Yakima that I learned about Santa’s helpers; I caught them filling stockings one year.
When I was a teenager, my mother began hosting Christmas in my family home in Sumner. Sometimes you hear someone say “It just wasn’t the same,” and you think “well, of course it wasn’t.” Yakima had snow, always seemed to have snow, and the Christmas spirit was a thriving pulse, a living heart-beat in my grandmother’s house. My family home had no secrets, no gun cabinet, no boxes of 40 year old toys to sort through. The magic of my family home had had all of it’s secrets revealed to me in my youth; it lacked the promise of discovery.
Now my sister hosts our family Christmas, and there is magic again. She has four young children of her own, and a foster child besides. Even her giant Saint Bernard can feel the excitement of this time. He tackled me two days ago, running head long into my sternum as I crouched to photograph Isaiah. Leaning on one elbow, laughing along with my brother-in-law I said “I can’t feel anything.” It was at that time that my youngest nephew Luke began performing chest compressions.
Can anything rob Christmas of its spirit? And is not the spirit of Christmas embedded in the magic of this time? And is there anything more magnificent than a God become fully man to show us the way? In the future there will be another place for our family to thrive on Christmas. And some day I will have nostalgia over now.
albaniacalling 