What Christmas Means to Me
First things first, my age. I am sixty-nine years of age and will soon be seventy. That means that the meaning of Christmas has evolved and changed for me over the years and over my lifetime. I was raised in Pawhuska, Oklahoma, and the first Christmas seasons I remember occurred after we moved to 543 Prudom, a mere block from Union Grade School where I attended for six years. We had lived near the cemetery in a very small house, then on Gerard Street, and I have memories of those houses, but not of Christmas in them. Perhaps I was seven for the first Christmas that I remember.
I was a boy and so my wishes for Christmas were for toys, trucks, cars, erector sets, chemistry sets, a Daisy BB rifle, sometimes football or baseball equipment, all those things of boyhood. I usually got all of those type of things I asked for. Most of my friends got what they asked for as well. Does that mean we were affluent? No; most of us were kids born near the end of World War II, children of children of the Great Depression and our parents had been shaped by both. After the war, the world was changing and the American economy was providing a living for our parents, but not much more. Our parents drove Fords and Chevrolets, often purchased as used cars, struggled every month to meet the costs of food and rent and worked long, hard hours. For whatever reason, most of them wanted us to have a good Christmas, even if they could not provide much more than that.
My mother was a single mother although my grandmother lived with us and helped in many ways. My grandmother didn't work so she was available for the routine of the households. My grandmother was a fantastic cook, my mother could not cook. But my mother went to work every day, often with miserable hours, to provide us our basic needs. To my knowledge, we were never on any kind of state aid but we did have some family members around us who chipped in a few times when money was scarce. As I've gotten older I have heard more stories from a few people who said that they helped us when we did not have money to buy food, but all of that was when we lived by the cemetery in a small house known as Labell's. I think a family named Labell owned it and rented it out because I have never met anyone of my generation who did not know about the little Labell house. I do not know how the name Labell was spelled so I am using my best guess. I remember the house some, perhaps in part because it stood for many years and I could ride or drive by and get a mental picture. I was never in it again once we moved but I know it was very small, perhaps a living room, bedroom, kitchen and bath. It was what I came to know as a shotgun house. A shotgun house got the sobriquet from the idea that you could fire a shotgun at the front door and the shot would pass all the way through from front to back without striking anything else. I'll skip our living at Gerard Street and go to 543 Prudom.
I don't remember a single Christmas but perhaps several blended together but I remember something about one in particular. It was very cold, damp but not snowing, and my mother Bettie Payne, worked at the telephone office as a telephone operator. She may have been about thirty years old then, give or take a year. She was young and junior so she drew the very worst shifts and the worst shift was known as the split shift. The operator would go in, work four hours, have four hours off and then return for the second portion of the shift to get in her eight hours. We had a large Christmas tree set up by the one big window of the house, so it could be seen from outside, in detail if you were standing on our front porch. If you were just walking by, you could see it well enough to know that it was a well appointed Christmas tree with strings of lights and an angel atop. My favorite lights were what I called bubble lights. There was a round base with a bit of a flying saucer shape to it, then a long tube that rose above the base. After they warmed up a bit, bubbles seem to flow through the top and give the light an eerie, yet magic effect. I would look at them for long periods of time. The remaining light strings were the standard small bulbs in multiple colors of red, green, blue, yellow. My grandmother, known as Louise Lessert, had been very good with me all day and it was Christmas Eve so you can imagine my excitement, being then seven or eight years old, as I waited for my mother to come home with the promise that I could open a few of the packages under the tree with my name on them. My name then was "Stevie" for Christmas and birthday purposes, and probably most of my friends called me that then too. I had set aside a couple that appeared to be something I wanted. All I remember is the excitement of waiting for my mother to come home. We had no television then, only a large Philco radio and a record player so however I passed the evening had to be listening to the radio or reading. I don't think I had been outside playing, due to the cold and the darkness. I remember her coming home and in the door. She had a large yellow coat that she liked to wear and she had walked home from work, as she always did, since we had no car then. It is funny to me that today, I remember her walking in the door, the cold of outside lingering on her coat as I greeted her, whatever my greeting was, whatever my shouts of joy to see her. I thought it was about opening my presents but it was really about seeing her that night for whatever I did made her seem happier than I had ever see her before in my life. I opened two, possibly three presents, no more, and though I must have loved them, I do not remember what they were. But I remember her coming in, cold, yellow coat, frozen, the cold air lingering on her coat and her smile in spite of the misery of the cold that night. She kept the coat on for a while, until she warmed. That was the happiest Christmas of my life and I only learned why in 1992.
Bettie Brave, her name after she had married my stepfather Art Brave, in 1961, was in a nursing home in Bartlesville, Oklahoma in 1992, and the local newspaper had interviewed some residents, my mother being one of them. I did not see the story but several of my coworkers did and talked to me about it. The paper asked: What did Christmas mean to you? My mother told the story of this Christmas eve, wanting to come home, share Christmas with her son, feel the joy of watching him open a few presents and celebrate Christmas. She talked about her joy and happiness in it. The reporter asked why it was so special and my mother said, "Well, when I was a little girl, growing up in Oklahoma City, we did not celebrate Christmas and I always wanted to feel it the way other kids did." There was a pause and then Jane, my friend asked me, "Why did they not celebrate Christmas Stephen?" The answer lay long buried in me, I knew it but I had never voiced it and I said, casually, as though she had asked me how I felt and I had replied, fine. "Because they were Jewish." Then I understood why that Christmas was so important to her, and to me. It was not my first Christmas, it was not her first Christmas, but it was her first Christmas when the girl who still lived inside of her could have a Christmas like her friends had when she was my age then. It was the Christmas I felt something more than just gifts for me, food, friends and Santa Claus.
There have been many Christmas since then, many very good, some not so good, and I remember things from them, especially my own family and the year we got my son Stephen William Payne (1967-2003) a small dog named Sam. Christmas Eve, I had to enter the hospital when my left leg failed and I was in over a week. Sam opened the Christmas presents and destroyed a good number of them while my four year old son watched on in laughter. The young baby sitter watched television and talked with her boyfriend while Connie sat by my side at the hospital waiting test results. I hated missing that Christmas Eve at home with him but the puppy was his real Christmas present so everything worked out right.
What does Christmas mean to me? Memories; that more than anything. I remember my mother in her yellow coat with her joy on that frozen night sixty years ago. I remember my friend and neighbor Bobby Hughes coming over one Christmas to bring me his gift and pick up his. He was so funny with his flat top haircut and cute little jacket with a bow tie. His sister Kay probably tied it for him. He stayed long, we visited, told jokes, had great fun, and the memory is here today though Bobby has been gone from us twenty years. Every Christmas I see him again that day. He ate fudge, divinity, cookies, everything offered him, as though he had not eaten at home. I did not like hard candy and I always gave him mine. That Christmas may have been 1955 and we spent a lot of time together as kids. We were both friends and enemies, for all our time in school.
I am not good at giving and then keeping my mouth shut about it. I gave my waitress $50 in cash last week, I gave the girl who filled in for her $50 cash too, not tips, just gifts. I gave my waitress in Owasso a gift card for $50 for her son, for I learned she, like my mother was, is a single mother. I told her that my son died ten years ago and I can no longer give Christmas to him so I wanted her son to have something. It's not about the money, it's about the memories. This isn't much, but it's unexpected, from an acquaintance, not a family member, and it will give someone else a memory, a good one I hope, one like I have of my mother and her Christmas that I gave her without knowing that I was doing it.
What does Christmas mean to me? Giving, much more than getting. I love the season, although sometimes I become very depressed during it, perhaps because I still expect too much from it. I love those moments of giving when I don't have to and giving a memory, a moment to someone else. Those make my Christmas, make me feel good about the moment; not about myself, mind you, but about the joy someone else has, if for only a moment.
I have to tell a story I only just learned. As I said, I am from Pawhuska, Oklahoma and I went to Union
Grade School. While I was there, I had two friends who were brothers, fraternal twins, and I was close friends with them for several years. They also had a younger brother and since he fell in with us, I was friends with him too; we are even better friends today. One Christmas, probably 1952, their mother who worked at the tent factory in Pawhuska was buying a bicycle, one bicycle for the two boys to share. She was a single mother with four children, a low paying job and difficult times. Each week, she went down to the Oklahoma Tire and Supply Store (OTASCO) and paid down on the bicycle. As Christmas was approaching, she asked the manager if he would let her go ahead and take the bicycle and finish paying it off. He agreed and she had the bicycle for the twins. Then, as often happens, the tent factory closed and this struggling, caring, single mother was out of a job. She had to pay rent, get food, clothes, school expenses, and she missed payments on the bicycle. One day, the man drove up to their apartment in his pickup truck, stopped and took the bicycle from the boys. My friend told me that he watched as his two older brothers resisted crying out, "No, Santa Claus brought us that bike!" He took the bike back to the store. My friend said, "That's what Christmas meant to me." He's a good man and I love him so I hope it has gotten better for him.
My memories, fortunately, of Christmas are better than his, at least of that time. What Christmas means to me is memories, my own, and those I hope I help create for others when I do something to help me feel better about life. I kid my friend who is a Santa Claus every year. I ask him, "Where's my pony?" He tells me I have been bad again and I'm always grateful for that. Being a little bad is part of having fun. This year, before I turn seventy, I'm finally getting my pony. I bought it myself, a Melissa and Doug stuffed pony, so I can show my Santa friend, but I can't keep it here, so I'll be sending it on to the Fink Ranch in Tennessee where I know my pony will be well cared for and enjoy its days, perhaps giving some little girl memories, maybe her mother and father for now.
My son was a musician, guitar picker extraordinaire, singer and songwriter. For Christmas, as for his birthday, I place guitar picks on his gravestone in Pawhuska Cemetery with the hope that people will take them, that in some way it keeps his memory alive and the pick brings them luck or joy. If they stop to see his name there, the guitar on the stone, maybe it keeps his name and memory alive. He was a good kid, gone to soon. He wasn't perfect but he was my son and I loved him.
Do memories light the corners of our minds? If they do, then we should put them out for others to see for memories should light the spirit of the world, with light, brilliant light of all colors, with the red, green and blue of Christmas and mostly the light and color of love, especially memories of Christmas.
Stevie Joe "Red Boots" Payne
