in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette
"I'll be home for Christmas..." the song goes, "you can count on me." I've heard it all my life: it's one of my mother's favorites, conjuring an environment of love and security she's longed for all of her life. "Christmas Eve will find me / where the love light gleams..." After mentioning the snow and mistletoe outside, the presents under the tree inside, the song ends, of course, "I'll be home for Christmas... if only in my dreams." From all the words we hear, we understand that this environment of love and security once existed for the singer, but perhaps can't be reached this year (or perhaps forever) except through beloved memories. But the memories will be forever treasured.
My mother worked hard to create Christmas for us. So many women do. I have some beloved memories as a result, and some that came from my father as well. Because we moved several times as a family, however, the meaning of "home" lost its rootedness in community and became simply wherever the family was. When my parents split up after too many years of living crosswise with each other, there were two homes to be at Christmastime, neither one I had ever lived in.
But a couple of weeks ago, while thinking about the Bethlehem story, it struck me that Joseph and Mary were not home for Christmas that first bright shining day. They were involuntary sojourners far from home, and when they reached Bethlehem on Christmas Eve, everyone was too snug in their homes, enjoying their close-knit family life to take two strangers in. Not even the innkeepers could be bothered, who stood to gain a little more income from accommodating them. So Jesus was born outside: outside of home, outside of polite society, outside with the beasts of burden in their shelter, outside with the shepherds and the stars.
And that comforted me, because I've discovered that outside is where I am most at home. When I get those homesick urgings to return, what calls to me are scenes from outside our many homes: the backyard hazelnut tree and the beach at Brown's Point, with its Coast Guard lighthouse and the madrone tree that reached out over the water at high tide. To the gravel driveway, barns and alders along the fencelines on our five acres in Puyallup and the breath of my little roan mare, the buckets of milk replacer for feeding day-old dairy calves. The valley of Iao Needle on Maui, with its wild guava trees and brushy paths along the creek; the plumeria bush outside my bedroom window.
But the place I mentally go home to most frequently is my aunt's place on Lincoln Creek, Thurston County, Washington: 130 acres of forest and fields, only about 20 of them flat enough to farm. She had a job in town, but she was most at home outside, fishing, picking apples and berries, baling hay. I may have been born an outsider, but as I grew I received , permission to be myself from her example.
My family spent many Christmases with her there and in her home in town after she sold the ranch. But when I go home for Christmas in my dreams, it's to the ranch's rattletrap house and yellow formica kitchen table, the woodburning stove in the small living room with the red curtains she made herself. Then I fly out the back door, along the wooden porch past the barn where the freezer and chopping block stayed next to the tractor, down the driveway past the barns where they stored the oats and hay they'd harvested, through the fence to the creek. And when I get to the trees that lined the banks, the nettles that grew head-high, the smell of the mud and water, the sound of the riffle below the footlog, I'm home.
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Trudy Wischemann is a natively outdoors girl who writes in Lindsay. You can send your thoughts on Christmas and home % P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.
Note to readers: Five times I have attempted to insert photographs from my scrapbook of the farm into the text of this blog, which I am now abandoning in the name of getting caught up posting subsequent columns. Thank you for your patience! I may have to write a whole book about this place. TW
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