However you view the holidays...

...describe one of a possible many that you remember the most or that had most meaning to you.

I have a number to choose from. Ones from my youth in a small southern town are among the contenders. As teens, we would gather after Christmas morning and go from house to house. The town was small enough that you could walk it end to end if nobody had a car. Cookies and punch were always available. We would ohh and ahh over the tree and what our friend got and sit under the tree for a while. One present was the standard then and nothing very expensive, a way of doing Christmas that seems to have faded over the years into excess. Perhaps with harder economic times those days will return. A charm bracelet as the 'big' gift and perhaps and new nightgown was pretty much par for the gift course. Another possibility is when my husband and I went caroling in Boston on Beacon Hill, fog coming out of our mouths the air was so cold.

Another very special time, for multiple reasons, was when my father was dying. He was in a hospital bed at home under Hospice care. I'd been flying up since lung cancer took him to the floor four months earlier. My father, so strong into his eighies. My home town rallied around him that season. I flew up before my husband did because of his work. 'Santa' came to visit, a man from the Fire and Rescue Squad that my father had contributed generously to over the years...then carolers. They came into the bedroom and sang several songs. Children and adults from the church. When they sang silent night, my mother stepped in with the group and joined them. She had a beautiful alto voice. I'm glad he was still aware, even though his speech was garbled at that point. He died the day after Christmas. This post is for you, Daddy. (and yes, Southern gals still refer to their fathers as daddy forever).

I wrote the following poem in 2001. I could probably do better by him now, but...for better or worse, it's below. Thank you, Dead Mule, for publishing it.


my father


My Father's Many Funerals

My father,
superintendent turned gardener
in his retirement,
attended nearly every funeral
over his lifetime of losses in our
small southern town

'We must pay our respects,'
as bulletin in hand,
he sang farewell hymns
passed down from generations
of farewells chainlinked before us.

At age 83 he joined them,
the dry, warm seeds
for that spring's
planting, abandoned

Midweek...
A thumbnail of mourners,
I told myself.
No gathering suitable for
final respects he cradled
as diamonds in value.

The limo snailed up the steep hill
towards that tiny brick church
where my father
had taught Sunday School,
served as elder,
taken communion,
bowed head in prayer
Front pew
Same seat every Sunday.

Edging over the rise.
the limo offered first
steeple, spires.......car roofs.
Hundreds of car roofs.
A garden of color spilling
from parking lot into field.
Standing room only.

Respect, my father's winter harvest.
Our town's final gift.

Later, at my parents' home, I tucked
my father's seeds into pocket
to carry to my own home
for next season's planting.

I feel sure that he knew.

Pris Campbell
(c)2001


Published in The Dead Mule, An Anthology of Southern Literature,
Fall, 2002.