Christmas in Harmony

by Philip Gulley

  I pondered that for a moment. “There’s only one problem with that theory,” I said.

  “What’s that?”

  “It would mean God had to depend on people like Dale Hinshaw.”

  She winced. “That is an alarming thought, isn’t it?”

  This is the problem of theology—instead of bringing clarity, it often raises questions too frightening to consider.

  Some ministers’ wives memorize Scripture; my wife finds solace in old movies. It’s a Wonderful Life is her favorite. Our town doesn’t have cable television, but Clevis Nagle, the owner of the Royal Theater, shows It’s a Wonderful Life for free just before Christmas. When I was growing up, I would attend with my parents and brother, Roger. We’d buy our popcorn, then take our place in the fifth row from the back, left side. Everyone else knew better than to sit there.

  By craning my neck, I could peer through the gap in the curtain and watch Nora Nagle, the future state Sausage Queen, working the popcorn machine. For a number of years, the smell of popcorn had a carnal effect on me. One whiff of popcorn and I had thoughts true Christians shouldn’t have. At least if you took Matthew 5:28 literally, which, growing up where I did, was the only way to take it.

  As a teenager, obsessed with piety, I considered either plucking out my eyes (per Matthew 5:29) or cutting off my nose, thereby eliminating my olfactory capacity and, with it, the temptation to sin. I did neither, opting instead to wear nose plugs to the Royal Theater. While this had a chilling effect on my reputation, it kept me blameless against the day Jesus would return to take my soul to heaven.

  Still, I had dreams of Jesus coming back and finding me in the movie theater.

  “But I was wearing nose plugs,” I would plead with Jesus.

  “That might be, but you were still watching Nora Nagle through the gap in the curtain,” He would say, leaving my sorry carcass behind for the dogs to chew on.

  In time, these worries passed, for which I’m grateful, as fear of the Divine is a heavy burden. Which is why I feel sorry for Dale Hinshaw, who goes through life with a wary eye cast toward the heavens. He listens to Eddie talk on the radio about the unforgivable sin—grieving the Holy Spirit. Dale worries he might have accidentally done that, and thinks extra zeal on his part might get him off the hook. This is why he keeps nominating himself to serve as an elder. He hopes God will think twice before smiting a leader of the church.

  Dale took it upon himself to stop by Owen Stout’s law office to inquire if the church could hold a Nativity scene on public property. Owen didn’t think so. “’Fraid not, Dale. All we’d need is for the ACLU to find out and sue the skivvies right off of you and all the other elders. You could maybe even lose your homes.”

  This did not deter Dale from encouraging the other elders to stand strong for the Lord at our November meeting. “Let ’em have our houses, I don’t care. I’d rather be homeless and show the world I loved the Lord than live in a fancy mansion and be afraid to call myself a Christian. How many of you are willin’ to stand up for the Lord, even it means losin’ your house? Raise your hands.”

  “But I like my house,” Bea Majors said. “Besides, I just got new carpet for my living room.”

  “Is there any way we can love the Lord and still keep our homes?” Asa Peacock asked. “My house has been in my family since 1893. I’d kinda hate to lose it. If I’d known that was gonna happen, I’d have never agreed to be an elder. Sam, you didn’t tell me about this. You just said there’d be one meeting a month, and that I wouldn’t have to pray in public unless I wanted to. You didn’t say nothing about me having to give up my house.”

  It took me half an hour to settle Dale down and convince the elders they could keep their homes. I finally told them we could have the live Nativity scene in my yard.

  “Oh, sure,” Dale groused. “Hog all the glory for yourself. Why can’t we have it at my house?”

  “That’s fine with me, Dale. I just thought it would help matters along if I volunteered my yard, that’s all.”

  “How come Dale always gets his way?” Bea Majors complained. “Why couldn’t we have it at my house? I might not have a big, fancy house like certain other people, but it’s not a dump either.”

  “I’m sure Jessie wouldn’t mind if we had the Nativity scene in our yard,” Asa Peacock volunteered. “She was saying just the other day that she wanted to do more with the church.”

  Fern Hampton let out a heavy sigh. “I’ve been a member of this church all my life and we’ve never had one thing at my house. Not one thing. It’s like the rest of you don’t even want to be around me.”

  “Why don’t we find a way to share?” Miriam Hodge suggested. “That way everyone can be involved.”

  Yes, sharing was a grand idea. We appointed Dale Hinshaw to work out the details and proceed. By then it was ten o’clock, and I was wrung out. Christmas was five weeks away, and I was already exhausted. Walking home, I had a creeping dread about how a Nativity scene could be shared. But I shrugged it off, and thought how glad I would be when Christ got here, so life could get back to normal.

  Surprisingly, the next few weeks were blissful. Dale made himself scarce, though rumors circulated of his whereabouts: he was seen at the lumberyard buying wood for a manger, he’d stopped by Ellis Hodge’s farm to borrow assorted livestock, he and the missus were seen buying material and a bathrobe pattern at Kivett’s Five and Dime. In real fact, it was the calm before the Christmas storm.

  Four

  Preparations

  Barbara and I took the boys to see Santa Claus at Kivett’s Five and Dime. Bud Matthews is in the nursing home these days with bats in his attic. He thinks it’s 1943 and the Germans are after him. He props a chair in front of his door and only lets someone in if they can tell him who the starting pitcher for the Yankees in the third game of the 1939 World Series was. The nurses have written Lefty Gomez on a piece of paper and taped it to the outside of his door.

  With Bud off to the front, his son Ernie has assumed his Santa legacy and holds forth each Saturday in December. He doesn’t have his father’s flair for the role. His pants hang low, exposing his backside. He takes a fifteen-minute break every two hours when he smokes a cigarette out front of the store, in plain view of the children. We’re accustomed to it, but people new to town complain to Ned Kivett about him. Ned smiles, nods his head, and agrees to look into the matter. It takes about three years for the people who move here to realize that when we smile, nod, and agree to look into a certain matter, it means we’re just being polite and have no intention of changing.

  The philosopher Blaise Pascal reasoned that if God is real, then believing in Him would be profitable. If God doesn’t exist, no harm is done in believing, so the prudent person believes. This is our son Levi’s philosophy about Santa. Better to go along with it than risk waking up to an empty tree. He sits on Santa’s lap, pulls a list from his pocket, and proceeds to ask for the very things we’ve forbidden him—his own television set, a BB gun, a dirt bike, and various reptiles.

  Our son Addison draws near to Santa, his hands clasped, his eyes wide with awe. He is like a pilgrim approaching Jerusalem. When Ernie asks him what he wants, he babbles incoherently as if speaking in tongues. Ernie has to guess. “How about a truck? Ya wanna truck?” He already has a dozen trucks, but his ability to reason has failed. He nods his head. “Yes. Truck.”

  Then Ned Kivett’s wife, Racine, takes their picture for three dollars, which is used to buy presents for the poor children in town. She and Ned distribute the gifts the week before Christmas. The poor do not apply for assistance. It’s a small town; we know who they are. Or think we do. If you see Ned and Racine coming up your sidewalk the week before Christmas, you’ve either had a hard year, or people have been talking about you behind your back.

  In addition to the poor children, they give presents to the kids who are sick. But they have to be real sick. A head cold won’t do. It has to be leprosy or the plague or something like that. When I w
as growing up, Uly Grant had a knack for contracting odd diseases the week before Christmas and raking it in.

  Kivett’s Five and Dime is the only game in town, Christmas-wise. People are too suspicious to order from catalogs, thanks to stories Ned has told over the years about catalog merchants buying cocaine and supporting leftist governments with the very money God-fearing Americans have sent them. “You buy underwear from me, and you know where the money’s going,” he tells his customers. “Right back in your pockets, in your businesses, helping you.” He has a sign in his window that reads, Be Harmonian. Buy Harmonian.

  For a number of years, he had a gift-buying service for the men in town. For five extra dollars, Racine would select an appropriate gift, wrap it, and deliver it to the doorstep of your beloved the day before Christmas. One year, she delivered Pastor Taylor’s wife a size-six negligee with a name tag that read, To my lovely Samantha. Everyone who saw it agreed it was a beautiful garment. The only problem was that Pastor Taylor’s wife was named Erma and she hadn’t seen size six for a good decade. That year we had store-bought cookies at the Christmas Eve service. Ned ended the gift-buying service shortly thereafter.

  Now we men have to pick out our own gifts. Ned sets up a table of suitable gifts for us to peruse—waffle irons, dishware, towel sets, salt-and-pepper shakers in the shape of various fowl, corn-on-the-cob holders. Racine wraps our presents for an extra dollar. She peers at our selections. “Are you sure you want to go with these oven mitts?” she asks. “How about a necklace? We have some lovely necklaces.”

  No, we tell her, not for our wives, who are sensible women and would be upset if we wasted our money on such frivolities. Besides, they loved the oven mitts we bought last year. Racine sighs, puts the oven mitts in a box, and wraps them in gold paper, marveling that the divorce rate in our town isn’t any higher than it is. But we know our wives. We tried necklaces and flowers and other fineries, only to be scolded for our extravagance. We were told we shouldn’t have, that it cost too much, that the neighbors would think we were showing off. After a few years we believed them and went with oven mitts and corn-on-the-cob holders.

  I bought my wife a new toaster. I worried when I bought it that it might be too lavish a gift. It was a four-slotter with a knife sharpener, plus the slots adjusted to toast bagels. I debated for an hour whether to buy it. I imagined having to spend Christmas listening to her say that I really shouldn’t have, that it cost too much, that the two-slotter would have been perfectly fine.

  Racine mentioned my wife had been in the day before looking at the bracelets. “We have some very nice ones. I can show you the one she was looking at, if you’d like.”

  I explained to Racine that my wife has a rare skin condition and can’t wear jewelry. “The first year we were married, I bought her a bracelet and it turned her wrist green.”

  Racine sighs and wraps the toaster.

  My sons are with me. I give them ten dollars to buy their mommy a gift. They pore over Ned’s table, finally settling on an assortment of pot scrubbers and a ceramic frog pot-scrubber holder. Racine suggests a silver picture frame to hold a picture of the boys. Levi and Addison don’t think so. “She spends a lot more time washing dishes than she does looking at pictures,” Levi points out. I look down at my sons and beam with pride. That they have mastered the subtleties of gift giving at such a tender age thrills me. Racine sighs and wraps the pot scrubbers.

  With our gift buying accomplished, we head over to the Coffee Cup for lunch—hamburgers, french fries, and, since their mother isn’t there, Coke instead of milk. They drown their fries with catsup. They would chug it straight from the bottle if I let them. Penny has two pieces of chocolate cake left over from the day before, which she gives to the boys. Coke, catsup, and cake, the trinity of little-boy food. By the time I settle the bill with Vinny, they are running wide open, their gas pedals pressed to the floor.

  We collect our presents and go past Grant’s Hardware to look at the Christmas trees. I am descended from a long line of Christmas tree connoisseurs. The boys and I poke around, looking for the Holy Grail of trees. We bend the needles to check for freshness. We inspect the trunks for what my father calls “vertical integrity.” The ceiling in our living room is ten feet high. Our angel is thirteen inches. I like to give her a little haloroom, so we look for an eight-foot tree.

  Spruce trees are the best, but also the most expensive. When I tell my wife how much they cost, she suggests an artificial tree would pay for itself in two years. Not only that, she says, it would be safer. She recalls horrific stories about Christmas trees spontaneously combusting and burning down entire city blocks.

  I try to shield my boys from such heresy. Being young and unformed, they are vulnerable to deception. I let them wander amongst the trees, inhaling the balsam. Artificial trees, I tell them, emit toxic chemicals known to cause birth defects in rats. Sure, they’re cheaper, I admit, but when your child is born with an arm growing out of his forehead, will the money you saved be a comfort? I encourage them to take the long view.

  We find the perfect tree—the needles bend without breaking, good vertical integrity, an inch shy of eight feet. Uly Grant and I carry it to his pickup truck. The boys and I arrange ourselves in the back for the ride home. Left on Marion Street, a right at the library, down three blocks, through the alley, and we’re home.

  When we’d bought the house from Dr. Neely, he’d advised us to put the tree in front of the window across from the fireplace. There was a small hook protruding from the window sill. “The floor tilts a bit, so just run some fishing line from the hook to the top of the tree and you’ll be fine.” So that’s what we do.

  We wrestled the tree through the door, arranged it in the stand, screwed the bolts down tight against the tree, then ran the fishing line and pulled the tree upright. Next came the lights, then the ornaments, the icicles, and the angel. The boys pawed through the box looking for the Christmas elf, which my mother gave me when I was seven years old. They hide him in the branches near the trunk, this tiny elf, wearing a red hat and tunic, with a matching red face from when he sat next to a Christmas bulb in 1974 and was permanently sunburned. It is unsettling to think such a calamity could have happened under the watchful gaze of an angel, but such is the mystery of suffering.

  Despite her pro–artificial tree sentiments, my wife admires the tree. She inhales deeply, then smiles. “It does smell nice,” she concedes. “Just be sure to keep it watered. I don’t want it exploding.”

  The next day we stayed after worship and set up a tree in the meetinghouse. When I was a child, Dale Hinshaw heard a radio preacher allege that Christmas trees had their origins in an ancient cult that worshiped evergreens. Dale didn’t see how he could remain a member of a church that had cast its lot with Satan, so he left. He stayed away for three weeks, certain we would beg him to return. When we didn’t, he came back anyway, convinced we were so desperately lost he needed to stick around and lead us into Truth.

  These days, his prophecy takes the form of an annual exhortation for us to reject Christmas trees and return to righteousness, lest the Lord’s anger be kindled against us. “We’re all the time hearing about these Christmas trees catching fire. Did you ever think that might be the Lord’s way of warning us?”

  People are in no mood to listen this year. They’re upset with Dale for replacing the Christmas Eve program with a live Nativity scene. It wasn’t all Dale’s doing, but the other elders won’t shoulder the blame. They nod in agreement, then pin it on Dale. This is the chief convenience of having him in our fellowship. Though a boil on our backside, he is also a convenient scapegoat. Being irritated at Dale is our common bond; our shared exasperation is the tie that binds.

  “I’ve been getting a lot of phone calls about not having the Christmas Eve service,” Frank, my secretary, told me. “Folks are awful mad. What do you want me to tell ’em?”

  “Have them call Dale,” I said. “He’s in charge of this year’s Christmas program.�
�

  “What’s he got planned?”

  “Some kind of Nativity scene. The last I heard he’d borrowed three pigs and a cow from Ellis Hodge. Personally, I’m staying out of it. I want deniability in case it flops.”

  “Smart thinking, Sam.”

  Dale stopped by the office later that day. He was worked into a lather. “I was laying carpet in the manger and Bernie pulled up in his police car and told me I needed a building permit. Can you believe that? Here I am doin’ the Lord’s work, and he’s writin’ me out a citation.”

  “You were carpeting the manger?”

  “Yep. Bea Majors had some left over from her living room.”

  “I wasn’t aware they had carpet back then.”

  “Well sure they did. What’d you think they used? Linoleum? Boy, for someone who’s been to college, you sure don’t know your history.”

  He flopped himself down in the chair across from my desk. “The building permit’s the bad news,” he said. “The good news is that we got the materials for the manger for free from Uly Grant. All we gotta do is paint Compliments of Grant’s Hardware on the side of the manger.”

  This is what came from putting Dale Hinshaw in charge. The birth of Jesus was now compliments of Grant’s Hardware.

  “Are you sure we want to paint that on the manger, Dale?”

  “Got to,” he said. “The sign thanking Asa Peacock for donating the straw is gonna be in front. I don’t want two signs out front—it’d block the view of the radio man.”

  “Radio man?”

  “You betcha.” He smiled proudly. “I called WEAK over in Cartersburg, and they’re sending a fella over to do a live broadcast from the manger.”

  “Won’t that seem out of place?”

  “Nah, he’s gonna wear a bathrobe and be a fourth wise man.”

  “Four wise men. I see. That sounds a little crowded.”

  He frowned. “Yeah, it is getting a little full. I’ll have to think on that some.” He rose up from the chair. “Well, I gotta get going. Bob Miles wants to interview me about the Nativity scene for the Herald.” He paused in the doorway. “Say, you wouldn’t know anybody who’s got a baby, would you? We need a Baby Jesus.”