One Christmas One Time

by Bob Lonsberry

In the first-grade we were poor, in a house with three other families on a busy street a few blocks from school.
And it was Christmas.

I knew that. But I didn't know we were poor. You don't know those things when you're in the first-grade.
When you're in the first-grade and you sit in class with rounded scissors cutting strips of construction paper and gluing them around one another into hoops and eventually a long multi-colored chain that you string around the tree your teacher brought to class. You don't know much then.

Only what your mother tells you.

And mine told me not to get my hopes up. She told me that Santa might not be able to stop. That he might be busy, and might have to come to our house later.

And that we couldn't have a Christmas tree.

It must have hurt her to tell me that. I know it hurt me to hear it. It disappointed me. And she told me not to be sad, that something would work out.

She was 24 then, and her second baby was about six months old. My little brother Sean who slept beneath me in a box on the bottom bunk in a closet with a brown folding door.

She said something would work out and one night she popped popcorn and opened a bag of cranberries and we sat there with needle and thread stringing them into garlands to drape around our apartment. Mostly she strung and mostly I played with the thimble. Played with the thimble and ate the popcorn and marveled at how beautiful it was.

There was a party the last day of school. The last day of school before Christmas. A party with games and songs and cookies and at 3:30 a bell to go home. It was raining that day and I had a little sweater that zipped and I got it off the hook as the other children did the same.

And the teacher stood in the middle of the room and said something about the tree. Something about how if anybody wanted it they could have it. And I stood there with the long sleeve of my shirt bunched up near the shoulder of my sweater and I looked at her. It was a green sweater and my grandmother 3,000 miles away had made it and sent it to me in the mail.

And I looked at her and for a moment I wasn't shy. And I walked up to her and I said it matter of factly.
My mother said we can't afford a Christmas tree. We're not going to have one.
And then I stood there. And she looked down at me and didn't say anything for a moment and I figured she must have been thinking. Then it looked like she was choking a little bit and she coughed or cleared her throat and she said that I could have it.

Back then they nailed wood on the bottom of Christmas trees, an X, so they would stand up. And I grabbed that X at about hip level and pulled the tree the best I could out the front door of the school, the wind quickly catching it and rolling it halfway in my hands while the little construction paper ornaments, secured with pieces of yarn, flapped madly in the breeze. I had looped the multi-colored chain around my neck.

And it was raining.

And I was about as happy as I've ever been.

And I set out, pulling that tree along the sidewalk, a step or two and then a stop, lurching it bit by bit against the wind and the hill and the fact that it was big and I was small.

And at the corner I stood breathing hard and unsure, the cars passing quickly on the street I needed to cross, my halting progress so slow. I was there a while. And a couple of cars back at the stop sign a guy watched me. And when it was his turn at the intersection he put it in park and opened his door, one of those long sleek doors that swept back to the line of the fin on the rear of the car, and walked over and grabbed my hand and the trunk of the tree and took us both across the street.

After that it was just one more block and I was home, my sweater mostly soaked through and the construction paper gone limp and torn in the weather.

Usually my mother was at work, and she was that day, and on those days I went inside and watched TV until she or my step-father came home. But I didn't that day. I stood outside chilled, with our Christmas tree, unable to get it through the door alone, unwilling to leave it outside unattended.

And I was about as happy as I've ever been.

On Christmas Eve day we were home and someone came knocking at the door. Two or three men, I think, from my teacher's church, they said, and they had boxes. Big cardboard boxes. Two of them. In one I caught a glimpse of something colorful before my step-father shushed me away and he carried it to his bedroom. In the other there were potatoes and vegetables and a canned ham, one of those with the clear gelatin that tastes so good and salty.

And a little while after that he brought out a string of lights from his bedroom, the old kind that screwed in, and strung them around the tree and as dusk came on he plugged them in and we turned out the livingroom lights and sat there in the red, green and blue glow.

I could see it from my bunk in the closet. Not the tree, not all of it, but the glow. It seemed to fill the room. I lay there awake as long as I could, sent to bed so Santa could come, and only closed my eyes for what seemed like a minute. But in that minute he came and as I awoke I could see the presents in the predawn, out past the edge of the tree into the middle of the livingroom floor.

And I slipped down the bunk and got my brother out of his bed and ran shouting to my parents' bedroom so that they could come see what Santa had done.

In the first-grade we were poor, in a house with three other families on a busy street a few blocks from school.

And it was Christmas.

And I was about as happy as I've ever been.