(HOST) As most of us scurry around in search of last minute holiday gifts, commentator Willem Lange is remembering a Christmas that was almost entirely home-made – and it’s one that his family now looks back on as the "best Christmas ever".
(LANGE) It must have been the Christmas of 1972; our youngest was three years old. We’d had a bad year, and there wasn’t any extra money for presents. Then Mother, who generates about 98% of the bright ideas in our family, had another one. While the rest of us were gloomily anticipating a bare Christmas tree, she brightened up and said, "I’ll tell you what! Let’s make presents for each other this year!"
The gloom deepened. She had to be kidding! But she wasn’t; and as she described the possibilities, we could see three pairs of childish eyes begin to gleam with ideas.
You’d think a project like that would promote family harmony. You’d be wrong. Each of us had to have a secret, inviolate chamber in which to operate, and there weren’t enough rooms in the house. So we divided up the living room into work areas with sheets and blankets hung from twine stretched across the room. It looked like the dressing rooms at a medieval tournament. There were hand-lettered signs threatening death, disembowelment, or worse as penalties for trespassing. The sounds of sewing machine, sandpaper, and hammer filled the air. Friends loved to visit our little tent city and stroll coyly from pavilion to pavilion, hmming and oh-hoing loud enough to be heard by everybody. It was maddening!
As Christmas approached, smells of sawdust and hot sewing machine gave way to stain, paint thinner, and polyurethane. Tempers and sleep both shortened. It wasn’t likely any of us would be ready in time.
The three-year-old fell asleep among her watercolors about nine on Christmas Eve. The other two kids wrapped their still-damp presents and staggered off to bed around eleven. Mother and I joined them during the wee hours. My toothbrush handle smelled of turpentine afterward for as long as I had it.
But what a Christmas! Twenty homemade presents around the tree: dyed macaroni necklaces and paintings on driftwood from the three-year-old; toys, clothing, burlap wall hangings, and small pieces of furniture. But it wasn’t the presents as much as it was the direct and vulnerable connection between the giver and receiver; the shared adversity, and making the best of it, that brought us closer together than we’d ever been before.
We still have some of those presents, and still refer to that Christmas as the best we ever had. My son made me a beautiful heavy leather belt fitted with a bronze harness buckle that we found while hiking in the woods one day. But I remember most a scrap of pine that one of the kids picked up under my saw table and stained and varnished. It hung over my desk for years, engraved by a hot nail with the words, "God Bless You!" And looking back all those years, and looking around today, I can’t help but feel that he has.
This is Willem Lange in East Montpelier, wishing you all a wonderful Christmas.