The Nightmare After Christmas Shopping

LAST MINUTE CHRISTMAS SHOPPING IN 1956

1956 had been a life-altering year for my mother. She had an uneventful pregnancy but a challenging delivery in early June when I was born. She and I were hospitalized for 10 days. 

When Christmas rolled around, her strength had not returned. The endless diapers to launder – disposable ones were not widely marketed in the mid-50s. I deducted that I slept fitfully making rest difficult for my mother. (When my younger sister was born and slept through the night, my parents breathed a prayer of relief.) To top everything, I battled asthma as a baby. Quick trips to the doctor were required to stabilize my breathing.

Mother liked to be “in the mood” to Christmas shop. Her perfectionism led to procrastination. Not feeling as strong as she had a year ago also contributed to the last-minute shopping excursion.

From my earliest memories, farm responsibilities, specifically poultry chores, took precedence over all else. Many times, Angie and I had to help get chickens – 200-500 hens with a sprinkling of roosters – into the chicken house if we were leaving and not returning until after darkness would fall.

The plan for the Christmas shopping trip to Ponca City targeted being home before dark. Of course, all December days are short on daylight. Grandma Gladys Rainey Smith was willing to keep me in the car while Mother shopped. The premier shopping occurred on Grand Avenue in downtown Ponca City in the mid-1950s.

Cuzalina’s Drug Store’s employees were promoting instant developing cameras that evening. They photographed each willing customer and promptly gave them the print that developed on the spot. Anytime Mother looked at the photo below she lamented the awful scene they found upon arriving at the farm that fateful night. (Another Christmas blog that involved Cuzalina’s Drug can be accessed at: https://bernadeanjgates.blogspot.com/2016/12/some-extravagant-gifts-of-1940s-at.html )

Edmund Gates, Jr., Bernyce Smith Gates, and Calvin Callcayah Smith 
Mother noted wearing hair rolled or in pin curls in public  was not a taboo then.

            Trying to cram all Christmas shopping into one day resulted in arriving home after dark. My grandpa, Calvin Callcayah Smith, alighted from the car and walked briskly to shut up the chickens in the chicken house to the west of the house on the Jefferson place leased by my family.

As he neared the chicken house, he smelled the strong odor of a skunk. Upon entering the henhouse, to Grandpa’s horror, decapitated chickens lay around with the destructive predator still killing. (My mother always seeks to be accurate in her recollections. She does not recall whether Grandpa or Dad took out the perpetrator. With laser precision, she can unequivocally state NO leniency was extended to the killer skunk.)

My grandmother, Gladys Rainey Smith, assessed quickly that some badly injured hens could be salvaged and slaughtered for food and lessen the economic damage. Dressing or plucking feathers and processing the hens required the tired shoppers work into the wee hours of the morning to recoup some gain from a great loss.

What a blow to a family poultry operation! My parents and grandparents depended on the laying hen operation to buy the groceries throughout the year. As laughable as it appears now, the egg money was kept in a recycled cigar box from somewhere. (Angie as a preschooler loved to count money. The egg money box was off-limits. To ensure she stayed out of the box a realistic-looking plastic spider was strategically placed on top of the egg money. Angie’s dislike of arachnids kept her out of the egg money box.) Who knows where that cigar box originated since, during my lifetime, no one in the family used tobacco in any form? Nevertheless, the family recovered from the chicken killing perpetrated by the skunk and celebrated Christmas.

Almost every Christmas, some family experiences loss, injury, death or devastation, much worse than my parents and grandparents had in 1956. Yet Christmas observance is not about a season of perfection.

When we reflect on the first Christmas, a manger was not Mary’s first choice for her precious Baby’s crib. She remembered vividly Gabriel’s words Son of the Most High. A manger with dried animal slobbers seemed all wrong for a baby of divine distinction.

There may have been a feeling of measured panic as Joseph sought a suitable spot for the birth of the Son of God. He knew Isaiah prophesied of the coming of  Emmanuel – God With Us. Gabriel had told him explicitly in a dream that this baby was He who would save His people from their sins.
The overreaching government of Rome invaded lives in Galilee where Joseph and Mary lived. The powerful iron fist of Rome demanded the couple travel to Bethlehem in Judea for a census. A forceful military presence and Roman tax collectors occupying the region would be sure taxes were not evaded. The leader of their region could be described as a paranoid politician determined to retain his power no matter the cost in human life. Surely this was not the right timing or place for the tiny Son of God to enter the world. (To access another blog written about Herod the Great, the ruler at the time of the birth of Jesus, click on: https://bernadeanjgates.blogspot.com/2017/01/on-path-of-humility-for-success-in-new.html)
Oh no, this was God’s plan down to the last detail. He specialized and still does in the unlikely, the impossible, and the unthinkable. For this cause, many people miss God at work in their day-to-day chaos. Often, what they see or experience doesn’t fit their plans or their wishes. But God reminds us His ways are higher than our ways.
Lord Jesus, may we see Your peace in our chaos, Your joy in our disappointments, Your salvation in our sinful state, and Your presence in our loneliness. Emmanuel, God with Us, grant our prayer this Christmas.