The Family Nobody Wanted

by Helen Doss

  “‘This Christmas the tenth and final Doss child, a Mexican boy, is expected to join us in Boonville, California,’ it says here,” Carl accused me, jabbing his finger at the article and glaring at me as if I had the tenth and final Doss child hidden in my pocket.

  “I can’t imagine where they got the Mexican part, because I didn’t say exactly that,” I said. “I guess I told Wayne and Dick about the eleven-year-old Indian boy we had this summer. And I probably mentioned that if we could find one the size of Donny, say about nine years old, we’d love to adopt him.”

  “How you do run on,” Carl said dryly.

  “Why Carl! If one turned up, you know, if we just happened to discover a boy Donny’s right size—why, of course we’d take him. Wouldn’t we?”

  “Over my dead body,” Carl said.

  CHAPTER 15

  Merry, Merry Christmas

  OUR children begin preparing for Christmas soon after Thanksgiving. Christmas carols are sung at the tops of their little leather lungs all day long—while swinging, or bicycling, or making mud pies in the yard; even when they are in bed, long after everyone is supposed to be asleep, we hear strains of “Hark! the Herald Angels Sing” and “Away in a Manger” drifting out of each room in a high-soprano chorus. They wake up in the morning and pile downstairs to breakfast, hollering “Joy to the World.”

  The air is always full of secrets about who is making what, and for whom. Most of those in school create gifts for mother and father in their classrooms. How typical was that Christmas when our quads were in first grade! They went about giggling behind their hands, warning us that we would never guess what they were making because they would never tell.

  “It’s a surprise,” Susie hinted mysteriously, shaking her blond head. “It’s made out of clay, but you won’t know what it is until you open it.”

  “Susie painted hers blue, but I painted mine green,” Elaine said, her tip-tilted brown eyes shining. “You’ll never know till Christmas!”

  “You don’t smoke,” Teddy told us, “but you got to have something to put other people’s ashes in when they come visiting. You’ll never guess, and we’re sure not going to tell you.”

  “Teddy painted his red, and I painted mine yellow,” Laura said archly, wagging a chubby finger, “and are you ever going to get surprised!”

  Sometimes they talked about what they wanted for themselves.

  “I wish Santa Claus would bring me a cyclo-peed-jiak,” Teddy said.

  “A what?” Donny asked.

  “A cyclo-peed-jiak,” Teddy said. “So I could look up and see how they make things and do things, and how the world was made.”

  “Oh, you mean an encyclopedia,” Donny said learnedly.

  “Yeah, like one of my boy friends has at his house. I’d let everybody else look up things if they wanted, too.”

  “I wish I had a ’lectric train,” Timmy said. “But if Santa would even just bring me even a hammer, and a little saw, and some nails, I’d make me a purty good train outa wood, I betcha.”

  “I hope I get my stocking full of suckers,” Diane said, smacking her lips, “and bubble gum.”

  “Sugar candy and bubble gum makes holes in your teeth,” Susie reminded her. “See, you and Elaine got holes in your teeth already. None of us other kids got holes.”

  “But candy tastes so dishes,” Diane protested, her eyes as round as chocolate creams.

  “Delicious,” Donny corrected. “Daddy said that poison syrup tastes delicious to little ants that don’t know no better, too.”

  “God’s kind of candy is dishes, and won’t make teeth holes,” Rita suggested to Diane. “Why don’t you ask Santa for a stocking full of dates and dried apercots?”

  “Yeah, and stuffed prunes and raisins,” added Susie.

  “And walnuts, too.” Timmy rubbed his round tummy and chuckled. “And peanuts inside of shells. Oh, boy!”

  “Boy, oh, boy!” Alex imitated, rubbing his own round tummy as he jumped up and down.

  As Christmas came nearer, the tempo of excitement increased. The children got together in little huddles to discuss the mysteries of the season.

  “Is there really and truly a real Santa Claus?” Elaine asked the rest.

  “Of course,” Timmy said. “I’ve saw him. Oncst I sat in his lap.”

  “A girl at Sunday school went down to San Francisco,” Laura reported, “and she saw five Santas.” She looked around solemnly. “All at once.”

  Teddy scratched his dark head. “Something’s wrong there, all right.”

  Donny looked up from a book. He has the peculiar faculty of being able to absorb himself in his reading, and yet know what’s being said when he wants to put an oar into the stream of conversation.

  “Those are just Santa’s helpers,” he explained. “They dress up in Santa Claus suits all over the world, and help out.”

  “Where’s the real Santa Claus?” Teddy asked.

  “He’s a spirit.”

  “Like God?”

  “Sort of, you might say. Daddy says he’s the spirit of giving. When he gets inside you, then you act like a Santa Claus, too.”

  “How can he get inside me,” Timmy asked, “when he’s bigger?”

  “Well, anyhow,” Susie said, “on the night before Christmas, we better leave out a glass of milk and some graham crackers again, like we did last year. Just in case his spirit’s hungry.”

  A week before Christmas, Laura came to me, her grin showing a new gap. She held up a baby tooth, proudly.

  “Here, Mama. Put this in a envelope, and send it to Santa Claus.”

  “Mama,” Timmy asked, “why you allus tell the kids to give you their teeth, and you gonna send them to Santa Claus?”

  This set me back a little, because none of the older children ever thought to question the method I had worked out for the disposal of baby teeth.

  “You know, Timmy. That’s so when you start losing your teeth, you let me send them to Santa Claus, and then he’ll put an extra present in your stocking for every tooth you lost that year.” I always figured I was safe in this promise, since the children wouldn’t know how many little trinkets to expect in their stockings, anyway.

  “Yes,” Timmy pursued. “But what the gosh does Santa Clause do with all the teeth?”

  I was caught in the snare of my own fiction. When I was a girl, a baby tooth put under my pillow was replaced by a dime while I slept, although I did sometimes suffer a crushing disappointment when I forgot to mention my expectancy beforehand. Now that I had children of my own, but very few spare dimes, I had built up the tradition of putting the teeth into any spare envelope, and disposing of it in the round, pseudomailbox at the side of my desk. So far it had worked, made everyone concerned happy, and no one had ever been unintentionally disappointed. Yet now, when Timmy pinned me down, I saw that my unfinished myth had obvious holes in it.

  “The teeth,” Timmy repeated. “What for does he want all those teeth for?”

  Teddy, imaginative little Teddy, saved both the day and the legend.

  “Gosh, I’ll bet I can guess what he wants them for. That’s what Santa Claus’s little elves use in his doll factory, up to the North Pole. That’s what they use to make all the doll’s teeth, I just betcha.”

  “Oh,” Timmy said. “I didn’t knowed that.”

  The children love the warm traditions of Santa and their own embroidering of the legends; they revel in the fun of tree decorating and the hanging up of stockings. On the night before Christmas they scurry off to bed, pulling the covers to their chins and shutting their eyes tight, hoping to hear the tinkle of reindeer bells.

  Still, they do not forget that Christmas is basically a Christian celebration, the birthday of the Saviour.

  One of the high points of the pre-Christmas week is Carl’s retelling of the story of the birth of Jesus, from Luke, with the children clustered at his feet. Another high point is the annual Christmas program at the church.

  Lit by flickerin
g candlelight and decorated with greens, the humblest country church becomes a reverent sanctuary. The choir sings some of the great anthems, and the Sunday school presents a tableau of Biblical scenes depicting the nativity. Our younger children sit in the front pew, scrubbed and starched, their dark eyes reflecting the shine of the candles. On such a night, even little Alex’s eyes seem round. The older ones are in the tableau, as shepherds dressed in crude sandals and bathrobes, or Wise Men draped in discarded velveteen draperies and with striped towels around their heads. My own eyes are a bit misty, as I watch the tableau. I know the great wonder and the singing joy which the original Mary must have felt, upon being given a child to raise.

  Also, as I sit in the fragrant and candlelit church, I usually remember another tableau, an outdoor-manger scene which we did at our first church, when Donny was a baby.

  Carl had transformed the big, old-fashioned, front porch of our Cucamonga parsonage. By hanging his paint-splashed canvas drop-cloths across the front of the house and around the two ends of the porch, it had become a rock-walled stable. In the center of the porch was placed a crude, hay-filled wooden manger, where Donny lay as the Holy Babe, wrapped in swaddling clothes and spotlighted by a golden beam from above. I knelt by the manger, dressed in pale blue and white as Mary; Carl stood beside us, a regal Joseph in brown drapes and a glued-on brown beard.

  Tethered on the porch with us was a small donkey named Pietro. On the lawn grazed some borrowed Persian sheep and lambs, the long-eared black variety which might have been equally at home on the hills of Biblical Palestine. Two laymen, complete with shepherd costumes and crooks, tended the sheep, while our choir sang Christmas carols which were amplified across the broad lawn to the watchers beyond the curb.

  The floodlighted tableau lasted three hours at a time, for three nights in a row, during the week before Christmas. It was hard to stand still that long; it was even harder to keep warm when it was so cold, cold enough that smudge pots were kept smoking in the surrounding citrus groves to keep the oranges and lemons from freezing. Since we didn’t have a smudge to keep us from freezing, we did the next best thing: I added flannelette pajamas, wool slacks, two sweaters, wool socks, and galoshes under my thin costume, and Carl wore his windbreaker and hiking boots under his.

  Donny was warm enough, down in the hay with the swaddling sheets wrapped around his wool snowsuit, but he kept rebelling because he couldn’t sit up and point at the cars which drove up and parked in a continual procession. I had to keep singing and stroking his head so he wouldn’t let out a lusty yell. He also had a feud with Pietro, who insisted on chewing the hay from Donny’s manger, and ignored the large amounts of hay piled in all the corners of the porch. Donny would try to kick the donkey in the nose with his swaddled foot, and the donkey retaliated by trying to nip his foot. The feud lasted all three nights.

  The genial Italian who owned the donkey didn’t come for him until after New Year’s. By that time, Donny and Pietro had overcome their earlier mistrust of each other. Pietro would trot obligingly around and around on the circumference of his tether, while Carl held little Donny, chuckling, on the donkey’s back.

  Although by next Christmas Donny was two, and a little big to look like a baby, we thought it would be nice to repeat our outdoor tableau. When we approached the owner of the donkey to see if we could borrow Pietro again, we found we were too late. Donny’s old feuding friend had just been ground up and made into salami.

  “My family, we lika that kinda salami best of all,” he told us. “The donkey, she maka the best kind.”

  He offered to prove his point by making us a salami sandwich. We thanked him politely, and a bit sadly, excusing ourselves on the grounds that we really weren’t hungry. In view of our memories of last Christmas, it just didn’t seem right to eat Pietro.

  The most unforgettable Christmas, embellished with fanfare and hullabaloo and an unexpected deluge of gifts, was when we were chosen the “Christmas Family of 1951” by a coast-to-coast radio program.

  Since we almost never had time for the radio during the day, we didn’t know about the NBC “Welcome Travelers” program, and its contest for letters to nominate families “best typifying the Christmas spirit the year around.” One day in December there was a long-distance call from the producer of the program in Chicago. He explained the contest and told us a letter about our family had been chosen from thousands to be one of the ten which would be read over the air, competing for the grand prize. A lady in Michigan, a complete stranger to us, had written her letter from information garnered from the Life magazine article. Her nominating letter won a wrist watch for her, an apartment-sized food freezer for us.

  We were surprised and happy about the freezer, but we did not give the program much thought after we hung up. Our friends were more excited.

  “We were listening to the letter they read about you on the ‘Welcome Travelers’ radio program!” one after another called up to say. “Every day they’re reading one of the top ten letters. We can hardly wait till they choose the grand-prize winner!”

  We were too busy with our annual church Christmas plans to get very excited ourselves. Winning a big contest is the sort of thing you read about, but don’t expect to happen to you.

  Two weeks later, the producer of the “Welcome Travelers” program telephoned us again.

  “Brace yourself,” he said. “You have been chosen as our Christmas Family for this year. Three judges, Joe E. Brown, Cornelia Otis Skinner, and Wade Nichols, editor of Redbook, have picked the letter which was written about you.”

  It still didn’t seem real.

  “Our Christmas broadcast is to be made from your home,” he continued, “and the gifts you have been awarded will be presented at that time. The trucks containing those gifts are starting west immediately, and out entire cast will fly out there to make a tape recording on December 21st. The recording of our show will be released at our regular broadcasting hour on Christmas Day.”

  The night before the recording was to be made, after the children were in bed, Tommy Bartlett, Bob Cunningham, and the producer and staff writers, came to make final arrangements for the next day. Carl was needed to help the movers, and members of the show, set up the prizes and equipment. They wanted at least the children and me to be surprised, so we were to leave first thing in the morning and stay away until the show was ready.

  It was ten in the morning when I piled the nine children into the station wagon, and none too soon. We were just turning out of the drive when I saw, through my rear-view mirror, two moving vans lumbering up the highway behind us. I distracted the children’s attention to the bridge we were about to cross, and they didn’t notice the trucks turning in beside the church.

  We spent the morning at a friend’s ranch. The nine youngsters had a joyous time, never suspecting that their house was being turned upside down to prepare a surprise for them. The only hint I gave was, “Wouldn’t it be funny—if Santa Claus got his dates mixed up, and came early this year?” We had our picnic lunch, then Alex and Timmy took naps in the cottage while the rest whooped back to their play. At two o’clock Carl phoned.

  “They decided they want you to come on home, so the first part of the broadcast can be done with us alone. They’ll send a car back for the children in the next hour.”

  I told the children Daddy wanted me to go back. They all raised a clamor.

  “So quick?” Rita asked. “We hardly been here, yet.”

  “We’re having so much fun,” Elaine added.

  “You may stay another half hour or so,” I promised, “if you’ll come right home when we send a car back for you. Some of Daddy’s friends will bring you home.”

  “We will, we will!” they chorused, and Alex bobbed his head like a chickadee.

  I hardly knew our house, when I saw it. Crowds were milling around the church and our yard. The trucks were parked in front, plastered with signs reading, LOADED WITH PRESENTS FOR THE 1951 WELCOME TRAVELERS CHRISTMAS FAMILY! Th
e house, white with new paint Carl had put on that summer, now looked like a Christmas package. Candy-red cellophane swags looped around the house and outlined the windows, there were green holly wreaths in the windows, and jolly little elves peeked from above the front windows and the porch light.

  I made my way through the ring of bystanders and into the crowded, unfamiliar-looking house. The air was blue with cigarette smoke. The living room was jammed with large, bumpy objects covered with sheeting. In the dining room, our homely tables of different heights and all the nursery chairs and makeshift boxes were gone, and a blond-mahogany dinette table, with six chairs, stood in the center of our linoleum rug. A Westinghouse electric kitchen was temporarily parked around the dining-room walls, complete with refrigerator, range, dishwasher, automatic washing machine and drier. The window seat was filled with tape recorders and broadcasting equipment.

  The general public had been kept outside, but the rooms were still crowded with reporters and photographers from newspapers and wire services. Wayne Miller was there with his cameras for Life. Besides all these were the members of the radio staff, the sound technicians, and the decorators imported up from San Francisco.

  After a brief review of the questions that would be asked, the NBC microphone was brought upstairs to Carl’s study in the church, where the first part of the program was recorded. Then Carl and I came down to stand in the living room by the lavishly decorated Christmas tree, which stood knee-deep in wrapped presents. Here we were interviewed again. We had just finished this second part of the broadcast when someone called, “Here come the kids!”

  We saw them pile out of a car and stream through the gate. They were so entranced with their transformed, fairyland house, they didn’t notice the people standing around.

  “Oh, boy, Santa Claus did come early,” Diane squealed, jumping up and down and clapping her hands.

  “Oh, boy-o, boy-o, boy!” Alex cried, jumping up and down, spatting his small hands together.

  I opened the front door. “Come in and see what Santa brought!”