(This column appeared in The Atlanta Journal and Constitution of Dec. 24, 1964.)
A friend who is a newspaper clipper and saver sent me a yellowed, slightly brittle copy of a column I wrote just before Christmas eight or 10 years ago. The date was missing, but my youngest child, who now has babies of her own, was nagging me about finishing a “Madonna suit” which she needed for the Spring Street school play. So I know it’s old. But the situation isn’t much different.
In those days I hung out the kitchen window of our old house on 13th Street, giving the window panes their annual cleaning and listening to a sort of medley of Christmas sounds from within and without. I watched my neighbors bringing in Christmas trees and tidying up their walks and drives with small, illegal, fragrant leaf fires.
And I noted the disorder and confusion in my own household, concluding: “It’s a domestic jungle. There must be some more tranquil way of getting ready for Christmas. And yet as I hang out of the kitchen window in the December twilight, it seems to me it’s a pleasant commotion. In a little while I’ll climb in the window and start on the Madonna suit. It’s lovely to be a little girl playing the Madonna in the school play. It’s lovely being a parent at Christmastime.
“We have strange ways of readying our households for the coming of the Lord — but who would change them?”
This year I didn’t have a Madonna suit to make. I did try my hand at four rag dolls and as this is written, one is finished, one is half-finished and two are assembled but unstuffed and, of course, undressed. Everybody’s coming for Christmas Eve supper, and so far, there’s half a loaf of state bread and a jar of instant coffee in the house. But somehow I feel giddily happy and so full of gratitude and loving kindness I think I’ll pop.
The Christmas cards really start the mood. They look so pretty and they say such warm and friendly things.
One of the best this year is a copy of a poem which Ollie Reeves, our late poet laureate, wrote for The Constitution’s Christmas issue in 1960. His wife Vivian and his daughters sent it out as a Christmas card. The last verse makes the whole reason for our weariness, our frenzied preparations — and -our joy — come clear:
Though the stable and the manger and the inn fall in decay,
He who walked the world a stranger dwells within our hearts today.
Never ending is the story, though the centuries have flown,
First the stable, then the glory of the kingdom and the throne.
Voices of the children blending, Christmas music, sweet and gay,
And the joy that is unending — “Christ the Lord is born today.”
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