A Christmas Memory

By Barri Bryan

(c)copyright Barri Bryan

It exists now only in a quiet and secluded corner of my heart, that memory of a Christmas long past. To journey there I close my eyes, open recollection's gate and step across the invisible barrier of time into another age. The year is 1936 and the place is a small town in far West Texas.

By some miracle of the mind everything has stayed just as it was then. I hurry down the narrow streets toward a shabby little house on a barren lot. Its paint is peeling and one porch post sags. I open the door and go inside. I see once again a living room with worn furniture and a threadbare carpet. But for all the room's obvious poverty it exudes an air of festivity and expectation. A scraggly Christmas tree, decorated with construction paper chains and strings of popcorn and cranberries stands in one corner. Two stockings, each filled with fruit and a stick of peppermint candy hang on hooks behind the tree.

Two children, a boy and a girl, sit beneath the tree excitedly opening the few packages that are under it as their parents look on with joy and amusement.

I move neared for a closer inspection. In keen and quickening ratio to my hindsight, I realize that the gifts are cheap, even by nineteen thirties standards and that they are wrapped in used holiday paper. The children don't see the small and subtle flaws that are so easy for me to detect. For them a cheap baby doll and a little toy truck are prizes beyond their wildest expectations. How absurd is the logic of the heart.

With a touch of sadness I realize that I can recall my Christmas memory but I can never annihilate space and time and once again claim limited experience and an untried heart.  That nostalgic realization pulls me back to the present. Opening my eyes, I stare into space, looking but not seeing. How inaccessible is that lovely landscape of lost youth.

In some secluded corner of my memory there shimmers in the glitter of Christmases past, my special memory. Each year as the holidays draw near it beckons me backward in time and bids me close my eyes to see.