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Christmas--Texas, Greene, A. C.,--1923- , Texas--Biography.
publication date
:
1996
lcc
:
GT4986.T4G72 1996eb
ddc
:
394.2/663/09764
subject
:
Christmas--Texas, Greene, A. C.,--1923- , Texas--Biography.
Page 1
Christmas Memories
by A. C. Greene
Illustrations by Geoffrey Greene
Page 2
A. C. Greene, 1996
All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America First edition 1996
5 4 3 2 1
Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to:
Permissions University of North Texas Press P.O. Box 13856 Denton, TX 76203
The paper in this book meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of paper for Printed Library Materials, Z39.48.1984.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Greene, A. C., 1923 Christmas memories / by A. C. Greene ; illustrations by Geoffrey Greene. p. cm. ISBN 1-57441-017-2 (alk. paper) 1. ChristmasTexas. 2. Greene, A. C., 1923- . 3. TexasBiography. I. Title. GT4986.T4G72 1996 394.2'663'09764dc20 96-8410 CIP
Page 3
The Too-Big Christmas Tree
Page 4
Page 5
Somewhere in your early years you begin to form your idea of Christmas. Not what it means as a religious festival, but the shape it should take to be the perfect season: the carols, the candles, the bells... angels, weathers, chimney-smoke at night, the hills of Bethlehem... all of that. And later, the regrets and sadnesses you cannot (and would not) shut out: the gifts you never gave and the gift you never got; sleigh rides you never took over snow
Page 6
that never fell; a sudden voice, so long gone it has no connection with time any more, only with Christmas.
Your idea of Christmas is usually like your idea of life: hopeful and glittery, lovely perhapsand never quite achieved. But you accept the improbability of a perfect Christmas without denying your idea. Bethlehem gets farther, candles are dangerous, angels grow upbut Christmas keeps its shape. And although you never experience it the way you vision, the mold persists, and you hold to it, even if you have lost the star. There is a wholeness to the Christmas sights and sounds; the sensations, the tastes... and the smell.
Page 7
A smell is hard to describe. The most satisfactory description is often an example: a baby smells "like" milk, a perfume smells "like" your wife. Smell is the most deeply personal of the senses because it involves the actual taking-in of an outside substance: into the nose, the head, the lungs. Taste, while similar in this respect, can be controlled. You may refuse to taste. But smell, often as not, is involuntary: it has penetrated without your having prepared for it. If it is powerful enough, charged strongly with emotion or memory, then you are thrust immediately into the world which one whiff has created, or brought back. That is the way the smell of
Page 8
Christmas happens to me; it invades my being and becomes... "Christmas." And to me, Christmas smells like a cedar tree.
There are many kinds of evergreens which are referred to as cedars. They share such characteristics as bushiness, pungent odor, and sharp, waxy needles. The green colors range from dusty gray to near emerald. What I grew up calling cedar is actually the Mexican juniper, a dark green shrub, heavy with fragrance, and bearing small, hard, purplish berries which (I discovered well after becoming an adult) give an identifying flavor to London gin.
Page 9
In the drier part of Texas, where I originated, these cedars live successfully on thin soil where even the mesquite cannot thrive. Ranchers consider cedars to be not just a nuisance but a positive menace. The cedars suck up water from the grasses, they start erosion by destroying all vegetation under their low boughs, and they proliferate almost beyond human control if left uncut for a few years. Of the main floral pests of the grazing countrymesquite, prickly pear, and cedarthe cedar is held to be the worst. The mesquite drops an edible bean, and the fruit of the prickly pear can have its prickles burned off and be eaten by cattle, while the cedar in that
Page 10
part of Texas seldom grows straight or abundant enough to cut and market even for fence posts.
But it makes an admirable Christmas tree if one can overlook some of its natural imperfections, or accept them as marks of strength and adaptability. What is more nostalgic, to a believer in the Christmas smell, than a cedar close and warm inside the house in that season? How it guides the senses and shapes the memory. The cedar smell means more to me than any particular of Christmas except the music, and it may transcend that, in reality, because my ideal in Christmas music is the sound of carols coming across moonlighted snow,
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