The first Christmas I can remember occurred 55 years ago. I was 4, and my brother Bob was 9.
The nation was still in shock from the assassination of President John F. Kennedy the previous month, though I was too young to be affected by that national tragedy. All I knew was that I wanted a bright red toy fire engine for Christmas. My brother wanted a bicycle. We shared a small bedroom in our Arkadelphia home. I recall Bob waking me up in the dark. It must have been about 4 a.m., perhaps even earlier.
"Let's go see if Santa has been here," Bob said.
We walked to the living room. Under the tree was the red firetruck and a bicycle. Our wishes had been granted. Too excited to contain ourselves, we began riding our prized possessions up and down the long hall that ran through the middle of our home. Our sister was a teenager by then and likely was highly annoyed that two little brothers were interrupting her sleep.
I remember my mother coming out of the bedroom and insisting that Bob and I go back to bed for a few more hours. Figuring that you could reach both God and Santa through prayer, I said a prayer as I crawled back into my bed. I thanked Santa for the fire engine. It was the last Christmas I would spend with my brother.
Two months later, my parents took Bob to Pine Bluff to see our beloved Ouachita basketball team play in an NAIA District 17 tournament game. The Tigers were attempting to earn a berth in the national tournament at Kansas City. Bob was killed that day in an accident.
I have a framed black-and-white photograph of me riding in the toy fire engine. I never look at that photo without thinking of Christmas morning in 1963.
The Lord works in mysterious ways. I loved to pretend I was a fireman. In 1989, I married the daughter of a fireman. We went on to have two sons, Austin and Evan. They're 25 and 21 now, and close like my brother and I were. They're not only brothers; they're best friends. I stare at that photo each Christmas season and realize how blessed I was that the fireman's daughter and our two sons became a part of my life. Christmas is, after all, a time for reflection. It's also a time for traditions.
People often ask me to describe a true Arkansas Christmas. I tell them there is no such thing. It varies from family to family, though there are traditions that many of us share.
My father insisted on a mincemeat pie for Christmas. My wife, a south Texas native, had never heard of mincemeat until she met me. Tamales were the food item in her family that signaled Christmas was approaching. We now have both mincemeat pie and tamales at our house. I also order a fruitcake from the Collin Street Bakery in Corsicana, Texas, something my mother always did. There are pecans, grapefruits and oranges.
Though it's not a part of our family's holiday menu, no Christmas season goes by without me thinking of the Helena oyster loaf. I was a fan of the late Richard Allin, the Helena native who wrote columns for the Arkansas Gazette and later for this newspaper. Allin, who died in October 2007 at age 77, would extol the virtues of the oyster loaf in print each December. He noted that it was to be eaten on Christmas Eve with chilled wine or beer.
"The tradition of the oyster loaf perhaps came up the river from New Orleans," Allin wrote. "It was known there as the mediatrice, so named because it was frequently brought home by wayward husbands who wanted to make peace with their angry wives. In Helena, it was simply a seasonal food item. Other methods were used to restore family tranquility. By the time the oyster loaf had arrived in Helena from New Orleans, there had been changes in its structure. The New Orleans mediatrice was simply a hollowed-out, buttered and toasted loaf of French bread into which mealed and fried oysters were piled."
The Helena version added lemon wedges, green olives with pits, ketchup and pickles.
My father wasn't one to sing carols, buy expensive gifts or wear silly hats at Christmas. But he loved the season. His primary recreational activity this time of year was quail hunting, which is now almost a thing of the past in Arkansas. I knew Christmas was near when he would carry a saw along with his 20-gauge Browning shotgun. We would saw down a cedar tree (with the farm owner's permission, of course) and bring it home. Cutting the tree wasn't the only extra activity on those December bird hunts. We would use our shotguns to shoot mistletoe out of oak trees and then use the saw to remove branches from holly trees if they had a lot of red berries on them. All of that would be hauled back into town and used to decorate the house.
My mom would be in the kitchen on Christmas morning, while my father made sure fires were burning in both fireplaces if it were cold. After stoking the fires he would sit in a chair, smoke a pipe filled with Sir Walter Raleigh tobacco and survey the scene--the cedar tree, the mistletoe, the holly branches, the gifts under the tree. If we were lucky, breakfast would consist of fried quail, grits, biscuits and preserves made from the wild blackberries my dad had picked the previous summer.
In the afternoon, my father would get a bit restless and ask: "Want to get out of the house for a couple of hours and get those bird dogs some exercise?" We would cross the Ouachita River bridge, make our way east toward Dalark on Arkansas 7 and hunt until dark as we walked the edges of soybean and cotton fields. After getting home, we would put the dogs in their pen, clean the birds we had killed and take a shower.
My father would then end the day just as he had started it. He would make sure the fires were burning brightly before sitting down, lighting his pipe and cracking some pecans. Dad has been gone for almost eight years now, and my mother has been gone for three. The memories linger.
For me, an Arkansas Christmas is the sound of a 20-gauge Browning firing and a saw bringing down holly branches. It's a fruitcake ordered from east Texas. It's grapefruits shipped from Florida and oranges shipped from the Rio Grande Valley of Texas. It's pecans, tamales and mincemeat pie.
Christmas is the smell of a freshly cut cedar, wet bird dogs, pipe smoke and the smoke from a wood-burning fireplace. It's the taste of fried quail and biscuits with blackberry preserves. It's a bright red firetruck, a shiny new bicycle and children who get up far too early on Christmas morning.
Merry Christmas, Arkansas.
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Rex Nelson is a senior editor at the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.
Editorial on 12/23/2018