The Best Christmas, ever.

seeing clearly through the fog of nostalgia...

Over the river and through the woods
to grandmother’s house we go;
the horse knows the way to carry the sleigh
through white and drifty snow.

Is that how that Christmas song goes?¹

Fog on the windows

It’s Christmas Eve 1974, and I’m in the back seat of a very large Ford station wagon, along with my brother and sister, as we make our way from our home in Little Rock to my grandparents’ farm near Fayetteville, Arkansas. I’m six years old, looking out the window, reading the highway signs: Conway, next exit. Wiederkehr Vineyards, five miles. Stuckey’s, just ahead. The lights of passing cars on the interstate illuminate the snow falling from the clear starry sky on this crisp, cold night.² I’m remembering the words to Christmas songs as the fog from my breath on the window appears, then disappears.

And I can’t wait.

My sister, two years older than me, is all the way across the enormous car seat, next to the other window, probably reading a book, probably something by Beverly Cleary or Judy Blume. My little brother, two years younger, is between us, asleep with a box of saltines, or maybe cheez-its, in his lap.

In this memory, Dad is driving and Mom is in the passenger seat. I doubt they’re talking. Mom, too, is probably watching the snow and the lights through a foggy window. The radio is playing Christmas songs from an AM station: Andy Williams, Johnny Mathis, Burl Ives.

We left Little Rock about two hours ago, and I’ve been watching the highway signs count down to the exit for the town of Alma and US Highway 71, which is where the drive to Grandma’s would begin to get exciting. There is really nothing in Alma but a gas station, and in my memory we would always stop for gas, and maybe a snack. French fries? Snickers? Mom would buy ginger ales here for our tummies, just in case, on the impending winding and hilly road through the Boston Mountains that stood between us and our destination. My sister would have to put her book down here too, for the same reason. My brother would wake up for the snack, but would soon fall back asleep.

Are we there yet?

Highway 71 was, until the 1990s when they built the Interstate 49 bypass, the easiest way to get from the biggest city in Arkansas, Little Rock, to the second biggest, Fayetteville. But it wasn’t really easy, especially in the winter, in the snow, right before Christmas. Google maps tells me now that this part of the trip took an hour, and I suppose in good conditions with no traffic that might have been the case. But Highway 71 was (and is) really a narrow two-lane winding road up into the Ozarks, through the towns of Mountainburg and Winslow, passing the Sky-Vue Cabins and the Dairy Dream, around Artist Point, with a lovely view down toward Lake Fort Smith.

Hwy 71, photo from a different trip, Dec 2006

Looking down toward Lake Fort Smith, Dec 2006

If you asked my parents, half the state was trying to get from Little Rock to Fayetteville at the same time that we were. This made sense to six-year-old me, in that way that the entire world revolves around whatever is important to a kid that age. We were going from our house to grandma’s house, so it made sense that everyone else was going from their houses in Little Rock to their grandparents’ house in Fayetteville as well. And they too were loaded with wrapped presents, and blankets, and ginger ales, and all listening to Christmas songs, watching the world go by through the fog of their breath on the window.

Highway 71 also carried every big truck and bus to that part of the state, and if there was the slightest weather issue, or a flat tire, or an accident, which, in my memory, there was that December evening in 1974, traffic ground to a halt. But we didn’t care, us kids. The snow was falling and we had snacks and ginger ales. My brother slept through the whole thing.

As the highway comes down off the mountains, it passes what was then the Fayetteville airfield³ and makes its way into town, where we would turn onto state highway 45, up and over one more hill before we made the long-awaited left turn onto the dirt road.

The Dirt Road

I’m not sure I can adequately describe the excitement of turning off the highway, onto the dirt road. Whether it was Christmas, or summer, or just a weekend at Grandma’s, turning off the highway onto the dirt road was the best part of the ride, the moment we’d anticipated since leaving our house in Little Rock hours before. The smooth sound of tires on pavement became the rough grumble of gravel. If we were asleep, we would most certainly wake up. Mom and Dad would let us unbuckle our seatbelts. In warmer weather, this is where we could roll down the windows.

The sights outside were familiar. The old leaning barn. The stone house where some distant cousin had once (and still might in 1974 — not sure) lived. The brick ranch-style house across the road that had a mule and a horse roaming around with dogs in the front yard. At my grandparents’ mailbox the road turned left, but we’d continue right into what was their road, grandma and grandpa’s road, which skirted the bluff above the river before swinging down into a ravine and up to where Grandpa, every December, stood a six-foot lighted plastic Santa Claus with an orange extension cord running the 100 feet or so to the house. That meant we were there. We were at Grandma’s House.

And what a house. Grandpa was a carpenter and cabinet-maker⁴, and he built the house in the early 1960s as a hunting cabin out in the woods. Later, a kitchen was added, and a garage, and second-story bedrooms, and a porch, and it became a home to my grandparents and my mom’s three youngest siblings.

In my memory, Lady, Grandma and Grandpa’s curly-haired dog, greets us as we climb out of the car. Christmas lights illuminate the snow, and the trees, and the porch, as we hug Grandma and Grandpa, and Aunt Bonnie and Karen and and Uncle David, and old Uncle Clive, who was actually grandma’s uncle who lived down the dirt road a ways, and who somehow always knew exactly when to show up for dinner. Grandma gives us cider, or was it hot chocolate, and warm homemade cookies, and there’s a wood fire burning in the giant fireplace that served as the heart of this house. There were presents under the tree, a tree that was actually cut from the woods and dragged back to the house.

In my memory, since it was Christmas Eve, we went to bed just a few hours later, after seeing on the local news that Rudolph had been spotted up in the Missouri clouds, or over Little Rock. We hurried into our pajamas and under the covers where my brother and I would set an alarm for 6:30am.⁵

When, what to my wondering eyes should appear…

It’s Christmas morning, 5:30am, still dark outside, and we are full of anticipation and excitement, knowing that Santa definitely came down the chimney and right now, this very minute, down those stairs and under that tree, was definitely the helicopter that I’d picked out in the JC Penney catalog, and we wondered if anyone would hear us if we snuck down halfway, just enough to peek, just to see the tree.

In my memory, we endure the longest hour ever, and I bide my time watching the world outside turn early-morning-blue as the sun rises, and the snow falls, and the fog on the bedroom window appears and disappears as I breathe.

I’m thinking of the words to Jingle Bells,

and I wait.

Grandma’s house at Christmas, sometime around 2000-2002

Those rose-colored glasses are a half-century old.

By now, you might have figured out that this memory of Christmas never really happened. At least, not exactly as I remember it. Everything I wrote is true, don’t get me wrong. If I were to ask my dad or my siblings about driving to Fayetteville for Christmas in 1974, I suspect they could corroborate much of what I describe. But Mom and Dad split up the next year, so I’m not certain the drive was as peaceful for them as it might have been for us. Was it snowing, or was the sky filled with stars? I am reasonably certain that the only white Christmas I experienced in my childhood was two years later, in 1976, the same Christmas that my great-grandmother Biggs suddenly quit breathing and died as the snow fell. I know we often had ginger ales in the car, but knowing my mother, she likely packed them so we would’t have to stop along the way. My brother had a box of crackers, but I think that episode took place in a boat on a lake in a storm, the next summer. The truck accident on Hwy 71, if I’m really honest about it, took place several years later, as we were driving up from Texas, where we moved in 1979 with my step-father. By then we were in a van, and we had a baby sister, which probably made things more stressful for Mom than I like to recall. We had no phones and no way of contacting anyone in case of an emergency, and I suppose everyone at the farm just had to cross fingers and hope that we’d actually arrive safely.

Many of the people in the story are gone now. My grandparents, of course. Old Uncle Clive, so many years ago. Lady died when I was still a little kid. The farmhouse still stands, though it’s no longer a farm. As my grandparents aged, and when Grandpa died in 1997, maintaining the land and the farm became untenable. Pieces were sold off, and Mom bought the house from Grandma in 2006 or 2007, when Grandma’s Parkinsons forced her to move to a care facility. Mom caught a bad case of cancer soon afterward, and my siblings and I had to give the place up.

But this is how I remember it. Over the years, I guess I’ve moved bits and pieces from here to there. I’ve enlarged some parts of the memory, shrinking and sending other less interesting, or conflicting bits, to the vaults. I’ve had fifty Christmases since that one, each with its own hazy truths and realities that I prefer to recall. My own kids will remember many of those Christmases differently than I will. The fog of nostalgia tells better stories.

I’m writing this on December 19. It’s clear and cold and windy here in Philadelphia, following two days of solid rain. Sacha and I decorated the living room and the tree last night. We did it by ourselves. The kids are now adults and decorating their own trees and their own living rooms. We lost our dog Cyrus last week, so there is a big absence here. Things are missing. But it’s a beautiful tree, and I really love our living room around the holidays. Johnny Mathis and Andy Williams and Burl Ives played from the internet station, on the Apple TV device.

There may have been fog on the window…

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Housecleaning:

Roads Like These

You may or may not know that I’m a pretty avid cyclist. I like taking a bicycle out somewhere, usually somewhere in the middle of nowhere, and really putting it work. Last year I procured a road bike made by Ritchey Bikes that I think is just the bees knees. About two weeks after building it, in April 2022, I went up to Pittston PA and took it out for 102 miles of very questionable roads. Ritchey asked me to write a piece about that ride, and they published it just yesterday. If you read the above, you might recognize some of the childhood memories herein.

https://ritcheylogic.com/blog/roads-like-these

R.I.P. Cyrus

As a follow-up to the newsletter issue from a few weeks ago, we said goodbye to Cyrus last week. You can read all about him there in that earlier post. It was sad and heartbreaking and beautiful and my god we miss this dog.

And to all a good night

I was recently digitizing some old videotape and found this clip (turn up your volume). It was shot one evening on the dirt road in front of the farmhouse in 2001 or 2002. That was a rough period for me, but I guess I was looking through the fog. And I’m glad of it. Merry Christmas, and Happy Holidays.

1. Not quite, apparently. It’s also not even a Christmas song.

2. I know, I know. Snow on a clear starry sky? Stay with me here.

3. Drake Field, not even yet an actual airport in 1974. A proper terminal was built in the late 70s, but now it’s just an air museum as most of the business and commerce of this part of Arkansas has moved 30 miles north to Bentonville, and XNA was opened in 1998.

4. And so much more: a carpenter and cabinet-maker and a farmer and a fisherman, and a Marine in the 1st Division stationed in the South Pacific during WW2. He drove us in his tractor around the farm and showed us how to set mouse traps and  shovel cow poop and shoot a BB-gun and join pieces of wood together to make things. One time I watched him actually reach into a cow and pull out a baby calf. I need to write a book about Grandpa..

5. And not a single minute earlier!