One Moonlit Night

With my 55th Christmas Day just a few days away, you might think I’d be getting the hang of this season by now. And in some ways, l am. But mostly, I’m not.

It should be the best time of the year and eventually, for a few hours on the big day, at least, it is. However, there is too much rush, too many expectations and sometimes, too much reflection and sadness.

Amidst it all, however, always, a few laughs.

On the last Christmas my mother was with us in 1984, my present to her was a book l hoped might help her cope with the loss of my father just 10 weeks before. It was called, Life is Forever, and when she went to unwrap it, I could see that her fingers had taken hold of not only the wrapping paper but the book’s dustjacket too. I yelled, but it was too late. A long, loud rip followed and when she extracted the damaged book and saw what she had done, she said, “Life is Forever, eh? Well, life may be forever but this cover isn’t.”

I could never figure out why despondency is often part and parcel of some people’s Christmases until the theory was proposed to me one time by someone who might know, that Christmas Day is the only holiday where memories of all our other Christmases that preceded it come flooding back, prompted by a song on the radio, an old movie on TV, some old decorations on the tree. At Easter, we don’t think of all our other Easters. Ditto with Thanksgiving, Labour Day, Canada Day, etc.

But the upside of remembering those many Christmases is how fond some of those memories are now.

Raised in the Catholic Church of the 1950s, before things loosened up a bit, I remember how strongly connected religious observance was to the special day back then. Christmas Eve, the younger ones of the seven kids in our family had to go to bed at 7 p.m., only to be awoken four hours later, stuffed, pyjama-clad, into snowsuits and hustled off to Midnight Mass at our church in the country. This was all done in service to the rule that we had to take communion on Christmas Day and any time after 12 a.m. qualified.)

Braving the cold at midnight on Christmas Eve was a bit of a challenge for a kid but St. Brigid’s Church was full and warm – the one time of the winter it was that toasty as the furnace was really humming – and the carols sounded slightly better than those sung that night by the choirs at the Vatican in Rome.

As we left the church, we met many of our Hagarty and Morrison cousins, aunts and uncles and exchanged lots of hugs and well wishes before setting out for home.

One night, with eight of us in the car – my youngest sister had yet to be born – we were heading south on the highway to our farm when my younger brother, who was four years old at the time, looked out the front windshield from his vantage point on his mother’s lap, this being the day before seatbelts, child safety seats, airbags and padded dashes, to see a very bright light in the sky which he had never seen before. Excitedly, he began pointing at that big shining round ball called the moon and then and there, he developed a lifelong interest in all things astronomical. (Today, his son is a filmmaker who works on Star Wars movies.)

That was one of my parents’ favourite Christmas memories and now it is mine too.

Jim Hagarty Sr.

Another one of mine is this. My father, on the surface, was not a demonstrative person with his feelings, having grown up in a time long before the birth of today’s “sensitive” man. That didn’t mean that he wasn’t sensitive; it just meant that you weren’t supposed to find out that he was. So, it was easy to conclude that he wasn’t. This feeling could easily be reinforced by the fact that he was not a big one for giving gifts. To his children when we were young, yes, but almost never as we grew older. (Unless you count a car and a university education as a gift.)

So those gifts that showed up for us under the tree on Christmas Day, as our ages grew into the double digits, that didn’t come from Santa Claus, had been bought and wrapped by Mom (and later, I suppose, by my older sisters). Dad might have taken Mom to town to buy the gifts, but we were pretty sure he didn’t spend much time going through the stores picking out any. My guess is he conducted hasty inspections of the beer parlours, pool halls and restaurants instead.

But for years, Dad did give his three farm boys the best Christmas gift imaginable. He’d always let us out of the “chores” and head off, instead, to the barns alone to feed the cattle and put down their fresh straw “bedding”. That was what the cattle got for Christmas.

That reprieve, which gave us the time, without frostbitten fingers and toes, to play with whatever toys we had gotten that morning, was priceless. It could only have come from someone who chose to make his own decisions about how he would show he cared. And while he would never have struck you, at first glance, as a Christmas kind of guy, I can’t remember another time of the year when I saw him any happier.

I sometimes wonder how my children will remember their early Christmases 50 years from now. I have a boy but no barn to which I can go to alone to relieve him of the chores. I hope, however, that he can think of something I might have done that will always remind him that I cared. Maybe it will be the big skating rink I build in our backyard in the city every year.

The presents come and go. Mostly, they go. Along with the people who gave them. But some of those Christmas memories never do disappear.

And by the way, I’ve come to understand, Life actually is Forever.

Merry Christmas.

©2005 Jim Hagarty

Author: Jim Hagarty

I am a 72-year-old retired journalist, busy recovering from a lifelong career as an unretired journalist. This year marks a half century of my scratching out little fables about life. My interests include genealogy, humour and music. I live in a little blue shack in Canada and spend most of my time trying to stay out of trouble. I am not that good at it. I also spent years teaching journalism. Poor state of journalism today: My fault. I have a family I don't deserve, a dog that adores me, and two cars the junk yard refuses to accept. My prized possessions include my old guitar and a razor my Dad gave me when I was 14 and which I still use when I bother to shave. Oh, and my great-great-grandfather's blackthorn stick he brought from Ireland in the 1850s. I have only one opinion but it is a good one: People take too many showers.