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A Christmas Story #4533
12/24/2013 08:24 PM
12/24/2013 08:24 PM
Joined: Mar 2004
Posts: 477
South Central indiana
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jarang1128 Offline OP
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jarang1128  Offline OP
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Joined: Mar 2004
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South Central indiana
A Christmas Story
Christmas is bitter sweet. The quiet sanctity of the season has long been bludgeoned by marketing, and the longed-for gentle quiet never seems to come.
It’s hard not to turn cynic and say “Times ain’t what they used to be.” And you might well hear someone say back to you, “they never were!”
I think a lot of us would like to spend part of December in our own kind of cathedral. A taut-drawn tent in a mountain pass. A spot down South where the evening carols would be the calling of the quail. Or right there at the timberline where the bugling of elk can pass for golden trumpets. Or that little brook you know where you can just listen to silence, while an inquisitive field mouse nibbles at the toe of your boot.
I think we know where our kind of Christmas really is. No man-made, plastic covered, ribbon-wrapped joy is going to fill the bill. Christmas, as one man so well said, “is inside us.”
I guess I am saying we have to run away from what is beginning to pass as festivity to find where the real festival is. Not a return to the age of innocence, but a return to the wonder of the mystery that we will never understand. Not to the answer of the computer, but to the asking of The Question.
My kind of Christmas week would involve me completely; a lot of it would be spent in my old clothes and sheepskin slippers.
It would start two or three days before Christmas, if I could set it up the way I want. The way I really want. The weather would be cold and clear, with the smell and feel of a coming snow hanging heavily in the air. My family, my wife and two little girls, would pack up the gear in our aging staging wagon and point the nose toward the nor’east weather. At journey’s end would be an old, but snug cabin. Preferably made out of slap pine still heavy with bark. The fieldstone fireplace would cradle a four-foot log and a big window would face West toward the setting of the sun.
A half-mile or so away would be a duck blind set on a sheltered cove, a sturdy blind that dulled the edge of the wind at your back, had room for a charcoal stove made out of a five-gallon pail, with some marsh hay piles up in one corner for the Labradors to sit up on, because the love to look swivelheaded, for the passing birds.
We’d go out, all of us, little girls and all, to gun the morning flight. Then back for breakfast. Homemade country sausage patties, fried eggs, hominy grits, and black coffee (with a touch of rum for father).
Then break out the sleds for a trip for wood. The little hands at work for branch-kindling wile I enjoy the chore of splitting wood. Remember the just-released smell of oak and pine, the smell that comes just twice, once as the ax cleaves the log- and again if the fire is just precisely right and your logs have some chance to dry.
To close the day, just the dogs and I would go out alone to watch the evening sun sink. Somehow without a steamy hiss, into the outer arm of water beyond our hook of beach.
After supper, while the dishes are getting done, the Labradors busy themselves supervising over my cleaning of the guns and setting up stuff for dressing in the cold velvet dark of tomorrow morning.
And then we read. Aloud. Jack London’s “To Build a Fire” or from his The Call of the Wild. Or Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows. Or a piece of that incredible Once and Future King by the late T.H. White. Then the special deep and sweetest sleep that can only come to the dreamer who lies beneath a six-inch comforter of down.
So the few days would go. Popping Corn. Making Candy. Or maple sugar icicles from the trees outside. Snowballs, flavored with vanilla and sugar. Chewing teaberry and sassafras bark. Whistle making or building a hearth broom out of the rushes. Simple things; not necessary in our time. But just for the touch of it. Just for knowing that it once was done for the need and the pleasure of being someone who still knows how.
And reading snow. Following the lace-making of mice feet. The mysterious arrival and disappearance of the tracks of partridge or pheasant. The parallel exclamation points left by some wandering buck or doe. The tiny, nearly human, delicate handprints of the coons or sleepless possums. The business-like, heavy, working footprint of the never-resting muskrat. The spade-like paddle prints of ducks.
I don’t know when a man can be busier doing nothing than when in a winter quiet camp. Shoring up the nest against the impersonal cold of December when instinct sends everything else toward a warmer sun or below the frozen deck to a dark sleep; not awakened by less than starvation hunger, to drowse and rumble until a softened pre-spring wind makes the waking welcome.
If I Had my way it would storm on Christmas Eve. Lacking, to my sorrow, a horse and cutter with bells to skim through the whispering fall of snow, I would put myself in harness and with the little guys behind on a sled we would go out and decorate a Christmas tree.
One of the stories I like to tell is how some trees became evergreens. The one that tells how anxious they were to protect the small animals and birds. And we will find a small spruce or fir to and hang suet from its palms. Some other, older, pine will have some branches stripped for the smell of Christmas as we put it on the fire back at camp.
Then the gifts. I have a seven year old who wants a knife. To Carve with. You think she’ll cut herself? I think so too. I know I did with my first knife. But that will heal and she will learn. And learn to carve. Do you know a better way of telling someone young, “I trust you.”
The other little girl wants a duck call. Lord knows why. I think partly because she’s a kind of noisy cuss who likes the voice of ducks and geese and partly because she knows the Labradors enjoy the raucous quacks. Can you imagine the kind of sound a baby moose with wings would make? However………..this is Christmas Eve.
In one corner, in the firelight, a small pile of white pine shavings grow. From the other, the guttural honks of some un-dreamed bird. Outside the snow is making a halo of light to be seen through the window. I give a silent toast to whoever it was that discovered, or invented, bourbon, little girls, Labrador retrievers, wives and whittling knives, and you know that right now I am in the presence of contentment.

-Gene Hill

Re: A Christmas Story #4534
12/25/2015 02:40 PM
12/25/2015 02:40 PM
Joined: Mar 2004
Posts: 477
South Central indiana
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jarang1128 Offline OP
Hoosier Hunter
jarang1128  Offline OP
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Joined: Mar 2004
Posts: 477
South Central indiana
To the top.

Merry Christmas to all of you.

I got two 3 and a half year old boys, a 10 week old chessie pup, and a wife who loves me despite all my faults. "And you know right know I'm in the presence of contentment".

Re: A Christmas Story #4535
12/24/2016 09:21 PM
12/24/2016 09:21 PM
Joined: Mar 2004
Posts: 477
South Central indiana
J
jarang1128 Offline OP
Hoosier Hunter
jarang1128  Offline OP
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J
Joined: Mar 2004
Posts: 477
South Central indiana
Merry Christmas!

Re: A Christmas Story #4536
12/25/2016 03:19 AM
12/25/2016 03:19 AM
Joined: Sep 2005
Posts: 1,099
Right where I belong
Double B Offline
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Double B  Offline
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Right where I belong
Merry Christmas and thank you for posting.


Followed by Buzzards
Re: A Christmas Story #4537
12/27/2016 05:00 AM
12/27/2016 05:00 AM
Joined: Sep 2000
Posts: 1,367
Indpls,Indiana,US
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ferb55 Offline
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Indpls,Indiana,US
What a wonderful read. Thank you and Merry Christmas.


Chief Operating Officer
American Hunting Lease Association
Re: A Christmas Story #4538
12/24/2017 07:45 PM
12/24/2017 07:45 PM
Joined: Mar 2004
Posts: 477
South Central indiana
J
jarang1128 Offline OP
Hoosier Hunter
jarang1128  Offline OP
Hoosier Hunter
J
Joined: Mar 2004
Posts: 477
South Central indiana
My boys are so excited for Santa. There are two red rider’s under the tree tonight.

Merry Christmas to all.

Re: A Christmas Story #4539
12/24/2017 07:56 PM
12/24/2017 07:56 PM
Joined: Mar 2004
Posts: 477
South Central indiana
J
jarang1128 Offline OP
Hoosier Hunter
jarang1128  Offline OP
Hoosier Hunter
J
Joined: Mar 2004
Posts: 477
South Central indiana
Quote
Originally posted by jarang1128:
My boys are so excited for Santa. There are two red rider’s under the tree tonight.
“And you know that right now I am in the presence of contentment. “

Merry Christmas to all.

Re: A Christmas Story #4540
12/25/2017 04:49 AM
12/25/2017 04:49 AM
Joined: Nov 2004
Posts: 3,592
Terre Haute
sticksender Offline
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sticksender  Offline
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Terre Haute
The only outdoor magazine we got way back when, was Field & Stream. And with each new issue that came in the mail, the first bit I'd always read was "Hill Country". That guy sure could write.


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