Craftours Lifestyles Magazine December 2018 | Page 12

A Personal Christmas Story
by Jim West
“Tending the Home Fires”
Our hardworking parents always did
their best to provide memorable holidays
for their family of seven.
Weeks before Christmas,
my father pulled double
and even triple shifts at the
cement mill to make sure
there would be presents
under the tree. Coated in
ashes and soot he’d drag
into the house each night,
bone-weary from cleaning
out smokestacks. Besides
one full-time job as the city
clerk and another mothering
us, Mom did all the things
necessary back in the 1960’s
to make our budget stretch:
sewing clothes into the
wee hours of the morning,
mending
hand-me-downs,
packing school lunches and
laundering cloth diapers.
Even
so,
my
parents
emphasized
the
memory-
making moments: designing
elaborate macaroni ornaments
to decorate the tree, hanging
dozens of cheery greeting cards from loved
ones around our bedroom door frames,
and singing carols as we hauled aging
boxes of decorations from the basement
to the living room. In mid-December, Mom
gathered her baking sheets, her huge
wooden rolling pin and her kids to spend
an entire day in the cramped kitchen
baking and decorating sugar cookies.
And she always delegated one duty
to me. Because our scant living room had
no fireplace to hang stockings, we used a
cardboard-kit substitute. It was my job to
assemble it each year, that special place
where Santa would soon leave his presents
for us.
Against one wall, I unfolded the fireplace in
front. Then I placed and balanced the black
cardboard mantle that bore wounds from
dozens of punctures where we’d thumb-
tacked our stockings during holidays past.
After I inserted a red light bulb into the hole
near the metal spinner, I plugged in the cord