The sweetest sound of my childhood Christmases was my mother’s laughter. It still echoes in my mind and warms my heart after all these years.
Life had never been easy for her. Her dad died when she was a child, and she worked in a café to help raise her four younger siblings.
She was a teenager when she married my dad, who uprooted her to take a job across the state. They struggled to get by on paper mill pay.
When her mother died young, she worried about her brother and sisters and sent them money when she could. Her brother was called off to war, and I watched her cry at night when she read his letters.
My dad’s drinking caused her more pain and tears. That might have provided the impetus for him to quit cold turkey before I got to high school.
Even during those hard years, Christmas made her happy. Her laughter would fill the house in the holiday seasons, and it became louder and more frequent as times got better for her and her family.
Christmases at our house in those days started early like they do here. We didn’t have festivals and fireworks, but making ceramic trees and homemade ornaments, ordering presents from the Sears catalog and things like that couldn’t wait until the last minute.
Neighborhood ladies were in and out of our house a lot between Thanksgiving and Christmas. Early on, they would sling clay and plaster around the living room making those customized ceramic trees that were so popular then.
One of the neighbors with a kiln in her garage baked the trees, and the ladies had more sessions at our house to paint them. My mother taught them to crochet birds, bells, candy canes and other Christmas tree ornaments.
Regina and I still have two of those lighted ceramic trees, and they are my favorite decorations. Some of the hand-sewn redbirds my mother made are on our tree every year.
What I recall most about those holiday gatherings was all of the laughter in the house. The ladies had coffee and homemade cookies while they worked, and their laughter blended with the Christmas music blaring from our little Victrola record player.
We never missed the Christmas specials on our black and white television set. My mother would laugh all through the Bob Hope shows and then cry at the end when they sang Silent Night.
There was more laughter when our family went into the nearby woods to get a Christmas tree, holly, mistletoe and black walnuts and hickory nuts for holiday desserts.
My mother always laughed at how the tree leaned when my dad got it mounted on his homemade wooden tree stand.
Cooking started a good while before Christmas to be sure we had enough fudge, divinity candy, fruitcakes and cookies for all the visiting kinfolks.
Our house smelled like the Friendly Bar when the fruitcakes were in the oven. My mother would find some of the whiskey my dad had stashed around the house and drench the cakes with it.
I was familiar with the aroma of the Friendly Bar. My dad would prop me on a stool while he drank with his mill friends. He gave me dimes for the punch cards, and I tried to win ceramic chickens and other prizes.
He took me by Corley’s Barber Shop afterwards hoping the hair tonic and talcum powder would cover up the stench of smoke and booze from the beer joint before we got home.
Kids played in the living room when the relatives got there, but we could hear the grown-ups laughing in the kitchen. My mother was loudest of all.
They reminisced about Uncle Buddy blowing up the decorative trash can with a red firecracker one Christmas and the time another uncle climbed onto the roof to make kids think Santa had arrived and fell off the house into the bushes.
Stories were retold about an uncle’s roman candle catching the dog house on fire, the cousin who cracked the window of Aunt Nell’s Buick the first time he shot his BB gun and the night my dad lost the bike I got for Christmas trying to pedal to the Friendly Bar.
We will have the ceramic trees, crocheted ornaments, divinity candy and other remembrances of those past Christmases this year, but I will still miss my mother’s laughter.
REPRINTED FROM THE NATCHITOCHES TIMES