Christmas tree, O Christmas tree: Part 14

 

Memories of an unexpected gift

This little ornament doesn’t really fit in with the rest of the decorations on The Beast, the Gunnels family Christmas tree.

It’s a little too cloying and precious for my taste. I can be sappy, too, sometimes (guilty pleasure: Hallmark Christmas movies; I know), but this one is just a little TOO cute, a tad TOO cuddly.

Regardless, I keep hanging it up each year because of a gift my sister got from Santa Claus when she was 3 or 4.

Santa Claus was a big deal at our house when I was a kid. The family opened wrapped gifts on Christmas Eve in order to clear the decks for Santa’s overnight toy dump.

Since we didn’t have a fireplace, my sister Kathy and I were always a little worried about how the Fat Man would gain entrance to Castle Gunnels since my mother made sure every door and window was locked tight before retiring for the night.

She always herded us off to bed early. As a parent, I now know why. Toy assembly at 3 a.m. can be a real drag, particularly when you do it in an open garage on a frigid December night in order not to wake the young’uns.

We always slept fitfully, our hearts beating wildly at the prospects of what awaited us Christmas morning. By 5 a.m. we usually were already sneaking down the hall for peek at what awaited us under the tree.

On this particular Christmas morn, we made our usual haul, my gifts arranged carefully on one side of the tree, Kathy’s on the other. (Santa sure was a neat old cuss!) Joyful pandemonium ensued until Mom could herd us away from toy central to gulp down breakfast.

As Kathy worked her way through her bounty, she came to a pink plush pixie doll with a soft rubber face, cherub cheeks and round, soulful eyes. She examined it carefully, then got up and walked into the kitchen, where she deposited the doll in the trash bin and returned to the living room.

“I didn’t ask for that,” she said in explanation.

Horrified, my mother retrieved the doll before it could be permanently stained by cranberry juice or turkey gizzards. She brought it back to my sister and attempted to convince a skeptical Kathy that it was beautiful and soft and that Santa had wanted to surprise her with an unexpected present.

“Well, OK,” she said dismissively and tossed the doll aside.

The story has become part of Gunnels family lore. I still enjoy telling it. The funny thing is, the pink plush pixie eventually became my sister’s favorite doll, the one she took to bed with her every night until she became too old for such things. By that time, the bedraggled pixie had been loved almost to extinction.

When I look at this ornament of two kids – brother and sister? – wrapped in a wreath, I see that sweet little unloved pixie doll. I imagine a similarity in the face of the pixie and that of the girl in the wreath. It’s hard to explain, but that’s the way memory works sometimes.

Don’t get the wrong idea about my sister. She’s a wonderful person, generous to a fault and always thinking of others. She’s the loving mother of two beautiful daughters, the eldest of which has never believed in Santa Claus a day in her life, thus robbing Kathy of one of the delights of Christmas. I sometimes wonder: Is that fate’s punishment for her unappreciative treatment of Santa’s gift?

She and her husband moved to the lake near Corsicana not too long ago and built their dream home. It’s on a peaceful cove just off the main shore of the lake. I like to sit on their back patio in the late afternoon and watch the ducks and a family of beavers slowly paddle the length of the inlet. It is a welcome haven in a crazy world.

At Christmastime, I’m always a little apprehensive about buying my sister a gift. I frequently chicken out and just give her a gift card. That way, she can buy something she wants and needs. There’s another reason, too. Who throws a gift card in the trashcan?

Christmas tree, O Christmas tree: Part 13

 A magical time

Behold the most modest, unassuming ornament on our tree. My son made in one of his playschools, no doubt with the help of one of his teachers. Arts and crafts never were his strong suit.

I’m fond of it because he made it, of course. But more than that, it looks homemade, like something fashioned out of salt and flour, then baked and painted. And because it does, it reminds me of a magical Christmas season more than 45 years ago when I was a cub reporter in Denton.

I returned to Denton in the summer of 1974 after a miserable seven-month sojourn at the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal, my first job out of North Texas State, now UNT. Frank Kelley, managing editor of the Denton Record-Chronicle, had taken pity on me after I had written a letter beseeching him to get me out of Lubbock. I must have sounded pretty desperate because he hired me over the phone to cover Denton City Hall.

The reporter who me showed around on my first day was a fellow with the grandiose name of Roy Appleton III. I had seen his byline in some back issues of the Record-Chronicle I had come across in Lubbock, and I had taken an instant, long-distance disliking of him.

My irrational response was based on the knowledge that the general manager and vice president of the Record-Chronicle was one Roy Appleton Jr. In my knee-jerk evaluation, that meant Roy III obviously was the boss's dissolute son pretending to be a journalist until he was elevated to upper management. To the manor born and all that. I hated him.

Until I met him. Roy was a bushy-haired frat boy from UT-Austin. He also was smart, funny, irreverent and talented. His stories were well-written and thoroughly researched, full of detail and nuance. He was by far the best reporter on the paper and bristled at any suggestion he was riding on his father’s coattails and coasting on the Appleton name.

We became, of course, great friends. We’ve remained so for more than four decades.

In those years, Roy was married to Angela, a striking, fiery-haired woman he had met in the R-C newsroom. They were living in an old farmhouse east of town on family property just off Mingo-Fishtrap Road. The land once had been the Denton County’s debtor jail, where the destitute worked the fields. It was known by all as the Poor Farm.

In 1974, the farmhouse was sagging and weather-beaten. But it was water-tight and snug in the winter, and Roy and Angela loved it.

As did I. I was a frequent guest at the Poor Farm. We’d sit on the comfy porch, drink beer, smoke an occasional joint and watch the trains pass on the tracks located a long stone’s throw from the house. When the weather was warm, we’d sit in the front yard and watch the stars shine clear and bright above us.

As Christmas approached that year, it was decided that we would travel to the Fannin County farm of Angela’s parents, located southeast of Sherman, where we would cut down a Christmas tree for the Poor Farm.

Fortified by booze and other stimulants, we searched the property until we found a well-shaped cedar that fit in perfectly with the Poor Farm ambiance.

With some difficulty, we felled the tree and slogged it back to the car, fighting a bitter wind and a dusting of snow. It was, as I recall, quite an adventure.

Once back at the Poor Farm, we decorated the tree with homemade ornaments made earlier by Angela and a friend. The final touch was stringing the branches with garlands of popcorn and cranberries. We laughed a lot, we drank a lot, we ate a lot. We even danced. Like I say, it was a magical time.

The humble ornament pictured here looks a bit like those homemade ornaments we dangled from that tree so many years ago. Close enough to bring back fond memories of the Poor Farm. It’s probably long gone by now, replaced by housing developments and strip retail centers.

When Roy and I reminisce about our Denton years, we both agree that they were the very best of times. We were young and idealistic and believed we were making the world a better place. Our enthusiasm irritated some old-timers at the R-C. One accused us once of “playing journalism.”

Instead of resenting the remark as the insult she had intended, Roy and I embraced it. It became a catch phrase from that day forward. Separately or together, whenever we accomplish something significant, something worthwhile, something we are proud of, we raise a glass and say, “Here’s to playing journalism!”

Christmas tree, O Christmas tree: Part 12

 Simple but complicated

Shirley Richter not only was my wife’s mother, she also was Marice's best friend.

Marice talked on the phone with her mom every day, sometimes for more than an hour.  They shared everything with each other, and whenever Marice had a problem, her mother was the first person she consulted.

When Marice was pregnant with our second child, we went in for an amniocentesis. After the OB/GYN at Big Baylor in Dallas completed the procedure, which she had performed with the help of a powerful sonogram machine, she asked us if we wanted to know the sex of the baby.

Since the amnio results would provide that anyway, we said yes.

“Well,” she said, maneuvering the sonar wand around Marice’s abdomen, “it’s definitely a boy.”

“What?” said a shocked Marice, who had been convinced she was carrying another girl.

“Oh, sure,” the doctor replied confidently. “See, there’s his penis.”

Marice cried all the way home. All her siblings were female, as were her closest cousins. She knew nothing about raising a son. Neither did her mother, the child-raising expert. How, my wife despaired, do you potty train boys? I remained silent, acutely aware that you handle pregnant women delicately even under the best of circumstances.

When we got home, Marice fled upstairs and slammed the bedroom door. A few minutes later, Shirley called to see how the exam had gone.

“How’s Marice?” she asked. She’s upstairs crying, I replied.

“What’s wrong? What happened?” Shirley asked, alarmed.

“We’re having a little boy,” I said.

“Oh, I understand. Let me talk to Marice,” said Shirley, all business now, ready to provide aid and comfort.

Mother and daughter weathered the crisis, and Ethan turned out fine. In case you’re wondering, he was potty trained in the regular way – stand here, aim there.

Shirley, the youngest of four children, was the unplanned offspring of her Russian immigrant parents. Her big brothers spoiled her and her parents doted on their baby girl.

In high school, she was popular and – in the vernacular of the day – a dish. There’s a family photograph of her as a cheerleader, her smile bright as sunshine and her hair cropped short and sassy. It’s easy to see why she never lacked for suitors.

She ran her household with an iron fist clothed in a proper white glove. Her husband adored her, her daughters revered her and her large extended family recognized her as the glue that held them all together.

During Passover, she always prepared two Seder dinners on successive nights. Each could seat as many as 30 guests. Shirley believed that no one should be alone on the holidays, and there was always a place at her table for such “orphans.”

She met her future husband, a besmitten Fred Richter, in community college. And while she never got her degree, Shirley was well-read and had a quick mind. For years, she served as the bookkeeper of her brother’s carpet firm. She had strong opinions about almost everything.

Shirley would have liked this ornament. It’s a lot like her. Simple, but complicated. Delicate, but an object of substance, created to withstand the dings and dents of time. It’s as beautiful today as it was on the day we bought it. And it absolutely commands the space on the tree where I place it each year.

At the end of her life, Shirley waged a courageous battle with cancer with her typical grace and generosity, thinking almost always of her family first. As in everything else in her life, she met the end in her own way.

When the time came, she left the hospital and went home. There, surrounded by her three daughters, she died, a woman of dignity and compassion and fortitude.

Christmas tree, O Christmas tree: Part 11

 

Da Bears!

What, you may well ask, is a Chicago Bears ornament doing on the Christmas tree of a guy who was raised watching the Dallas Cowboys?

The answer is simple enough. Marice’s father, my father-in-law, was a lifelong Bears season-ticket holder. Even in the depths of winter, he’d bundle up as only Chicagoans know how and trudge off to Soldier’s Field to watch his beloved Bears battle in the ice and snow.

Fred Richter was a good man, loving father and devoted husband. He also was a deeply committed Jew even though he was raised in a secular household and came to Judaism late in life.

As a prominent member of his synagogue, Fred was one of the Jewish leaders who went to court in 1977 to stop the Nazis from marching through his northern Chicago suburb of Skokie, then home to the largest number of Holocaust survivors outside of Israel.

Their lengthy legal battle and the constitutional issues it raised ultimately convinced Nazi organizers to abandon their scheme to march in Skokie, where they knew the impact and the anguish would grab bigger headlines, and to shift to Chicago instead.

On the day of the march in the summer of 1978, only about 20 knuckle-draggers showed up. When they were met with the jeers and catcalls of 20,000 protesters lining the streets of Chicago, they fled the scene after about 10 minutes.

Fred’s teenage daughter, Marice’s younger sister Marla, was among those anti-Nazi protesters. She can be seen in a video taken that day shouting obscenities at the strutting thugs. I strongly suspect Fred secretly applauded her visceral, if crude, reaction to the strutting morons.

In his younger years, Fred had played football, so his love of the game later in life came naturally. Marice has a couple of photos of her father playing in high school.

In one, he is listening closely to a coach lecture on the field. In the other, he’s trying desperately to catch a pass. His efforts are being hampered by his helmet, which has slipped so low on his forehead that it’s obstructing his view of the ball.

 Sadly, Fred never saw my son play. Alzheimer’s disease robbed him of his memories too soon for that. But I’m sure he would have been a very proud grandpa and, knowing Fred, would have insisted on instructing his grandson in the finer points of the game.

Marice and I framed those photos of her father on the gridiron and gave them to Ethan. They are among his most treasured keepsakes.

When I look at them, I see a serious, good-looking kid, determined to get the job done, a kid who grew into a man I respected and admired. Richter family history doesn’t record it, but I’m willing to bet he caught that damned ball.

Christmas tree, O Christmas tree: Part 10

 

A nutcracker stands guard.

Nutcrackers are the most ubiquitous Christmas decorations in Gunnels Manse.

When our children were young, Marice discovered a love of nutcrackers, perhaps for reasons I’ll explain in a bit. As a result, nutcrackers abound throughout our Grapevine home at Christmastime.

A giant nutcracker stands in our entryway. Two large nutcrackers guard either side of our fireplace. Smaller nutcrackers fight for attention from shelves, tabletops and consoles.

And more than 20 nutcrackers of all types hang from the branches of The Beast, our Christmas tree.

Here’s a favorite, one of a set of five that Marice discovered on a shopping trip long ago. They are inspired by the artwork of 19^th-century political cartoonist Thomas Nast, who created the modern image of Santa Claus.

These nutcrackers are the heaviest ornaments on The Beast. Placing them is difficult since the strongest branches that can take their weight are not the most visible. But I make an effort because they are beautiful and give the tree a vintage look I love.

Why nutcrackers? Well, why not? The original story on which “The Nutcracker” is based is quite wonderful, the ballet is awesome and Tchaikovsky’s music divine. I’d say that’s inspiration enough.

But there’s another, more personal, reason why Marice and I find nutcrackers irresistible.

When our daughter was young, Marice enrolled her in the Grapevine Dance Academy. There Rachel learned the rudiments of ballet and other dance forms. She loved it and demonstrated real potential.

Each December, Grapevine Dance staged a production of “The Nutcracker” to demonstrate the talents of its students. The older, high school-aged girls danced the featured roles, and the younger ones were cast in minor parts, depending on their age and experience.

Rachel performed in two Nutcrackers, the first as a mouse and the second as a dancing nutcracker. From a parent’s point of view, the programs were magical. The kids worked hard and danced their hearts out. I get a little choked up just thinking about them.

At about the same time, nutcrackers began to come home with Marice from her shopping trips. A coincidence? Hmm, I think not.

The dance academy always struggled to find male dancers for its Nutcrackers. Male ballet students are a little rare in Northeast Tarrant. In Rachel’s last production, the academy director convinced a couple of members of Grapevine High’s football team to help out.

These guys were a far cry from Baryshnikov. Mostly, they just stood stoically on stage while the girls twirled and swooped around them. Occasionally, they were called upon to lift the dancers above their heads, which they managed to do with a modicum of grace and without dropping the girls on their keisters.

That year, the Grapevine Mustangs made the state football playoffs, and the team was scheduled to play out of town on the day of the Saturday performance. It was an afternoon game, and everyone knew the guys were going to be cutting it close to make it back in time.

As curtain time neared, anxiety levels were peaking when a car squealed into the parking lot, and the guys jumped out and ran to don their costumes. Everyone, including members of the audience who knew what was happening, breathed a sigh of relief.

The performance went swimmingly, and the Mustangs in the cast did themselves proud. Afterward, the kids, faces aglow, mingled with the audience in the theater lobby. Our gridiron heroes, their muscled thighs squeezed into tights, stood awkwardly to the side, obviously wishing mightily they were somewhere else.

 I approached and shook their hands, congratulating them for not pulling a muscle on stage that night.

“By the way,” I added mischievously, “I know why you’re doing this. You’re here for the girls.” (To be sure, the featured dancers would have set any high school boy’s heart aflutter.)

The two young men glanced uneasily at each other and said nothing. Satisfied, I grinned and walked away.

In case you’re wondering, the Mustangs won that playoff game. They went on to win state later that month.

Christmas tree, O Christmas tree: Part Nine

 

The pets of Christmas

Marice and I are dog people. But we didn’t start out that way.

My wife wasn’t raised with family pets. Her mother thought they were too much trouble or too messy or too, too … something. In college, she and her roommates had a dog, but Marice wasn’t the chief caretaker so she really had no idea about the joys – and challenges – of dog ownership.

When I introduced her to my family, she got her first close-up look of devoted animal lovers. My mother had a succession of dogs that she treated as well as – maybe better than –  she ever treated my sister and me. (Sorry, Mom, but you know it’s true.)

As for my sister, she’s owned multiple dogs and cats for years. I tease her that she’s only one cat shy of being her neighborhood’s “crazy cat lady.”

Marice was amused – make that smugly bemused – by the devotion my family showed toward its pets. She considered it quaint and eccentric.

Our children badgered us for years to get them a dog. I was doubtful about Marice’s comfort level with house pets so I left the decision to her. One day I got a call at work.

“I looked at a puppy today,” Marice said. By her excited tone, I knew the end to this particular story. “She’s the cutest thing. A little West Highland terrier. She’s very sweet and so good tempered. And guess what?

“She’s got your birthday!”

Resistance on my part being pointless, Kiera the Westie became the grand pooh-bah of Gunnels Manse. And Marice officially became a crazy dog person.

She cared for that Westie for 13 happy years, and when Kiera went to chase squirrels across the Rainbow Bridge, Marice quickly found another Westie to take her place. Now Charlotte, Lottie for short, rules our particular roost.

She’s also the toast of our neighborhood, a fact confirmed every day when Marice takes her for a walk. Everyone they encounter wants to stop and admire the little priss.

Buffy, my daughter’s Westie, is Lottie’s partner in crime. They’re two peas in a pod and compete fiercely for our collective attention. They are – why try to deny it? – adorable. As is my son’s shepherd/hound mix, Bailey. Like I said, we’re dog people.

So it’s no surprise that various dog ornaments adorn our Christmas tree. I’m particularly fond of this one. Marice always wants to know where I put it so she can sneak an occasional peak. She bought it because it reminds her of the late, lamented Kiera.

Christmas tree, O Christmas tree: Part Seven

 

This must be a Gunnels Christmas tree.

My father was not a particularly expressive man. He was stoic in every sense of the word and viewed the world with a quiet skepticism and suspicion borne of the hardscrabble childhood he had experienced.

One of three brothers, he grew up on a small farm in Eastland County. Times were hard and the living wasn’t easy. His father, by all accounts, was a domineering taskmaster who demanded his family toe the line. His line.

One incident tells the tale. When he was a youngster, my father picked cotton one entire season in order to buy a single-shot .22-caliber target rifle. But when he proudly brought the treasured rifle home, his father appropriated it as his own. It was a lesson my father never forgot: Life can be cruel and capricious and what you cherish most can be taken away.

He eventually retrieved the rifle from his father, and it now belongs to me. Made with an eye toward durability and function, it has a simple beauty to it. And it still shoots straight.

Pearl Harbor changed the trajectory of my father’s life. He left the farm and went off to war, joining his generation of Americans in saving the world from murderous butchers and madmen. Then he came home, married my mother and started a family.

After my daughter’s birth, the nurse placed her in my arms and I looked into her face for the first time. I was stunned to see in her round, wrinkly face a vestige of my father, a resemblance so strong it made me catch my breath and instantly brought tears to my eyes.

I know it was a trick of the imagination, a combination of brain neurons created in part by my regret that my father, who had died three years before, never got to see his granddaughter, who today looks nothing like him. But it seemed very real at the time, and my mother and I had a good cry together when I called her with the news.

Later, when my son came along, we named him Ethan Clyde, his middle name a tribute to my Dad. I told E it is a Scottish name, as in the Firth of Clyde. It is, of course, but it’s also an old-fashioned name, a country name. It suited my father, and my son has made peace with it. He and his male cousins will carry on the Gunnels name, for better or worse.

They’ll have to endure, as I have, a lifetime of hearing the name mispronounced. In the seventh grade, my junior high principal, reading a list of names over the intercom to the entire school, pronounced it Gunkells, thus bestowing upon me a despised nickname for the remainder of my school career.

For the record, it’s pronounced GUN-nulls. What’s so damned hard about that?

I’ve always considered this ornament, the largest one on the tree, as a kind of label, a sign designating this is a Gunnels, capital G, Christmas tree. Dad would approve, I think, but he would certainly never admit it out loud.