A CHILD'S CHRISTMAS IN EIGENHEIM

 

A CHILD’S CHRISTMAS IN EIGENHEIM

Rosthern Museum & Mennonite Interpretive Centre, Winter 2018

(Being a mixture of nostalgia, unverified memory, pure fiction shamelessly riding—in part—on the coattails of Dylan Thomas’ A Child’s Christmas in Wales. The narrator and all the characters mentioned here are pure fiction, as are the details of their acts and words. The Eigenheim School and Christmas concert, however, existed and included here in as accurate a representation as distant memory would allow, but still, tentative.)

It was't so much celebrating the birth of God’s Son that we were focused on as we crowded—Grades One to Eight, older and younger siblings, parents, and others from the church also known as Eigenheim—into the Eigenheim School classroom for the school Christmas Concert. Oh, we were reminded often enough that this was where our thoughts should be, but symbolism was lost on us; we were focused on that morning coming up in a few days. Perchance, there would be some goodies from the Eaton’s Catalogue under the tree, wrapped in colourful paper, promising hours and days, perhaps, of endlessly building towers and cranes, ships and trains with a mountain of Meccano girders and a million tiny bolts and nuts. Or revolvers so realistic that they could be loaded with rolls of gunpowder-flecked paper so they’d actually bang when pointed at the head of an irritating younger brother and their triggers pulled. (This latter was a very long shot since, being an Anabaptist family, guns were instruments of evil and we knew, even as we wished for something, anything that would enhance our lustful games of combat, that we’d have to continue to make our own slingshots and bows and arrows out of found materials and binder twine.)

I didn’t know what my sisters’ under-the-tree longings were about … couldn’t care less.

But first the mandatory memorizing of lines and song verses: we all knew Joy to the World but I had a hard time remembering if He rules the world, or No more let sin and sorrow cease came next. I remember chiming in on only the second syllable of verses as a substitute for memorizing, which I abhorred and wasn’t any good at. And then the nativity with a doll in a basket and Grade Ones and Twos with fake horns and fake sheepskin and the rest of us in old bathrobes or cinched car blankets and willow-stick staffs, performing like robots with shoes glued to the plank stage mumble-singing, “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace” with the three hoity-toity Grade Four and Five girls in bedsheets and paper tiaras with glitter, pushed to the front to herald that, despite our appearances, we were a host of heavenly beings.

To our parents, we were, perhaps, although it was only the pastor who stooped to thank and praise us, but only as an aside to his eulogy on the prowess of our teacher, Mr. Arthur Epp (same surname as half of his charges; what a lucky coincidence) and to Mrs. Toews on the pump organ. And we (read, “I”) felt for a moment, if not that I was a star, at least a warm glow of having been for a critical moment, a well-trained and obedient puppy.

But we all knew that the lead angel, Sarah, was better loved by this audience than any of the rest of us, or should I say, all the rest of us together, only because it was she who delivered the baby Jesus to the decorated cardboard manger, we told ourselves. I was equally drawn to two impulses regarding Sarah, one being to marry her and the other, a vague, undefined dream involving strangling and burying her out behind the horse barn on the school yard. My daydreams weren’t complicated, but they were dramatic.

The Christmas tree had to be as tall as the high ceiling would allow, and finding, cutting, delivering and decorating it was the only thing I ever knew the trustees to actually do—except for handing out those bags of treats as the last item on the program. The candles on the tree had to be real burning candles; how else would that tantalizing, sprucy smell be released to set the mood, or how else would our Christmas joy be elevated by having wandered so near to the death we would face if the tree ever caught fire … and not dying after all.

And then, the treat bag,  and tearing open the Cracker Jack box to find inside “the prize.” I don’t know if we were actually expecting that it might one Christmas be a gold coin, or a diamond ring, but the disappointment when, as always, it turned out to be a tiny plastic animal of some sort or a decoder ring that decoded nothing (which was lucky because our world contained absolutely zero secret messages requiring decoding, as if). That disappointment was a foretaste of what we would only learn grudgingly as adults that—not unlike life itself—what you get is invariably less than you’d hoped for. (We were also taught later that one shouldn’t use prepositions to end sentences with. I, at least, forgot what a preposition actually is.)

There was snow, of course, and a makeshift road plowed across the fields to make possible the trip to and from the school. And there was cold, and the sound of dads shaking up the coals in the furnace and shoveling in the hard black nuggets when we got home to a frigid cracker box of a house. The squeak and clank of the basement furnace door and standing on the register above the furnace and the delicious warm air up your pantlegs.

And there was the spilling out of candy on the dining table and the trading, a peeling and slow savoring of zipper-skin Jap oranges, the toffee that would stick your teeth together and the satisfying smack when you pulled them apart and the sweetness set your mouth to delicious drooling. And there was the turning on of the electric tree lights and the estimation of what might possibly be in the few packages already ranged beneath and knowing that there would be more packages in the morning, most likely resting for now on the top shelf of Mom’s wardrobe where snooping would be easy, but where I, for one, would never, ever consider going. Thus, Christmas divided our worlds—for many, permanently—into two parts: the nostalgic baby in a manger with sprucy aromas wafting symbolically through a church sanctuary and the part that would be real, the certainty that real joy comes in the form of windfalls of goods, roasted birds and cousins galore, those cousin reunions that might well start a festive afternoon with high-fives and “I know what let’s do” … and end with black eyes and bruised egos.

No one ever loved their mom more than I did mine. Not even the Son of God could ever tuck me in with such warm and gentle hands. In later life, theologians would say that a mother’s warm and gentle hands are guided by their love for the Saviour, and I would withhold my skepticism: I’ve seen a cow lick and lick her newborn calf, you see. I’ve seen a mother’s entire world focused down to just her and the newborn nestled in her arms, feeding at her breast, tiny fingers wrapped around her thumb. Does God invent love and hand it down, or do Mary and all the other moms incarnate the particular kind of love that we experience first—whether born in a barn, a hospital or a taxicab—and teach it to God?

But back to the real stuff. Among lean years of homemade socks under the tree, there was the year of abundance: 1952, possibly, when there was an electric train with tracks and a headlight and switches plus a box of Meccano spans and girders and nuts and bolts and tiny wrenches. We never did our chores in the barn as rapidly again as in that snapping-cold doldrum when, what I now know as the solstice time of the year when the day sleeps in ‘til ten or so, gives up on ever being warm again and goes back to bed in the middle of the afternoon, pulls the blanket over its head. And with the Meccano, we built a trestle over which we ran the train and as it laboured its way over the trestle bridge, we cheered and the whole world turned right side up in that instant.

And stayed right side up until my annoying youngest brother was tempted by Satan to paste his treat-bag chewing gum to the track, thereby derailing the locomotive, the coal  car, the passenger and the freight car and the caboose, a sorry scene of death and destruction. It took only seconds to cuff my brother’s head and restore the train, and taught us no lesson whatsoever. Some feminist of 2022 might declare this to be an example of the early development of toxic masculinity in boys. And Archie Bunker might say, “Those were the days, my friend, when girls were girls and men were men.”

I just turned eighty-one. I have little interest in Meccano or model trains, or Cracker Jack prizes or Nativity scenes, for that matter. We haven’t put up a tree for years, don’t give gifts and hope not to get any: we’re not upsizing, we’re downsizing for Pete’s sake. At some point, the joy of cutting a tree, decorating and lighting it gave way to a realization that the tedium of taking it down pretty much equaled any good feelings generated by putting it up. “The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away …” sort of. Who first thought that bringing trees into the house would be a good idea? Why not put a sofa in the woods and decorate it? Festoon it with live candles?

Call me Scrooge, or at least an old fart or a boring curmudgeon. I’ve had far too much time to think about the millions of children born under tents in refugee camps, in substandard housing in ghettos of poverty to unwed, teenaged mothers. Too much time mourning how human anguish falls so unmercifully on the weak to marvel at the virgin birth, especially as we have homogenized and pasteurized, civilized it for tasteful consumption. And if it didn’t begin as a folk legend, it certainly became one over the eons of telling and retelling it. Heavily symbolic, it must have been realized at some time that many who lack the imagination to interpret its parabolic import must be served the legend as story if they’re to benefit from it at all.

What it means for me at eighty-one is that I’ve become a consummate believer in the message of the incarnation, the man who so clearly caught the vision of the kinship of all humanity under an ideal of peace, love and well-being, the one we have for the sake of those who need that help, was named “God.” On the message of the incarnation, namely that Jesus’ witness tells us we are all—like him—children of God and therefor siblings, I’ve become a stumbling fellow traveler alongside, not beneath, the Christ our brother. On the worship of the symbols that characterize our Christmases, I’m a skeptic harbouring a suspicion that the legends that meant to clarify the meaning of family under God, are unable any longer to convey what that essential oracle was meant to teach us. 

But however messy our understanding might be at times, the fact that in that country classroom when the days of the years were at their shortest, darkest and coldest, we could hardly wait for the Christ child, well, that must tell us something too. If I look northeast from my living room window this morning, across the balcony with the pots of brittle grasses waving in a stormy wind, across First Avenue blown in with snow this Christmas morning, across the parking lot behind the library, I can watch the blinking lights of the Christmas tree in the square. And something in their valiant determination to shine forth through the drifting snow makes me feel a surge of contentment. Maybe it’s the thought that all those people who put up all those lights for me to see are either stupid to hang these strings with hands numbed by the cold, or are exercising a basic, mother’s-milk love that tells them to do something, whatever they are able to lighten the lives of their neighbours while they can.

I choose to believe the latter. Perhaps the striving toward joy and the occasional grasping of a handful or two is enough prompting for me to wish you, A Very, Merry Christmas.

Even if it comes from successfully building a Meccano trestle and running a train over it. Even it it comes through listening to Handel’s Messiah on YouTube. Even if it’s sharing the breast of a sacrificial turkey with your family while the radio quietly plays Old English Carols in the background.

Again, Merry Christmas.

George G. Epp

December 25, 2022