Christmas in Arkansas

Christmas in Arkansas

I don’t think I have to tell anyone who knows me, even casually, that I really love Christmas, and decorations, gifts, music, church, and family are all key parts of my Christmas experience.

I don’t have a lot of Christmas memories from when I was young but I actually remember delivering newspapers on Christmas morning as a 13-year -old Norphlet paperboy. Of course, since I was up and heading for the newsstand at 5 A M, I had already opened presents on Christmas Eve and had checked out what Santa Clause had left me. Those early Christmases were special, but not in the abundance of gifts, but in what our family put into the preparations before Christmas.

It was my job to find a suitable Christmas tree, and I spent several days a few weeks before Christmas looking for a good cedar tree. A couple of years back I tried to slip in a pine, but Momma, after doing the best she could with decorations, put her foot down, “No more pine trees, Richard!” But since I spent most of my free time in the woods, I had usually already spotted a decent cedar, and about two weeks before Christmas Day, I would take my hatchet and cut it down, drag it home, and put it on a wooden stand I had made. However, Momma wasn’t just a one tree decorator. Not on your life. Next, I had to find a holly tree with plenty of red berries, and then climb some big oak to get mistletoe. After Momma finished decoration the living room, kitchen, and porch, you could sure tell it was Christmas by the way the Mason House looked. I guess Momma gave me ‘decorating for Christmas’ as part of my heritage.

That Christmas morning Santa Clause left me four steel traps, some smokers, and in my stocking I had two oranges, some nuts, and a candy cane. I had a trap-line to make a little money selling furs and the smokers were little six inch tubes that when lit the smoke would run animals out of a hollow log. 

I don’t remember any of my paper route customers every giving me anything when I delivered the Christmas morning paper, but since it was usually before six o’clock, they probable weren’t up. I finished the paper route that Christmas morning at six and headed for Flat Creek to run my trap line and add the four new steel traps I had received from Santa.

                                                                     &

Another Christmas memory has me fast forwarding to the late l970s when our family decided to take a Christmas Vacation in Egypt. A flight to Little Rock in a blinding sleet and snow storm stared a very different Christmas experience. Dr. Robbie, an El Dorado Physician and native of Egypt, helped us with the arrangements, and since his family still lived in Cairo, his brother-in-law met us at the airport. We had just stepped off the plane and were about to get into a long line to go through immigration when a well-dressed Egyptian walked up and asked if we were the Mason Family.

 “Yes,” and after a welcome, he said, “Follow me.”

“But the line….?”

He just shook his head, and as we followed him around the long line, he just waved at the customs attendants.  Well, with Dr. Robbie’s family helping us, we have a great time in Cairo, but the Pyramids where just our first stop. After three days in Cairo, we flew up the Nile to Aswan to see Thebes and the Valley of the Kings. Since Vertis and I had lived in Libya for two years, we didn’t bother with tours, so when we got off the plane, I walked out to the taxi line and quizzed drivers until I found one who spoke good English.

“How much would you charge to be our driver each day while we’re in Aswan---in American dollars?” Dr. Robbie has advised me to take several hundred American dollars because the Egyptian Pound was so weak.

“I’ll charge you twenty American dollars a day,” he replied.

So off we went and it was the best $20 we have every spent. At the drivers suggestion we stayed on the south bank of the Nile in the morning to see Thebes and Karnack while the tour busses crossed the river to the Valley of the Kings, and then when the tour busses returned at noon, we went across to visit the pharos’s tombs. But we didn’t just go in the few tombs open to visitors. That’s when a few extra dollars to the guards, opened sites that weren’t available to others. We had been advised to bring large American flashlights since the lighting in even the tourists’ tombs was bad. So on Christmas Day, Vertis, Lara, Ashley, and I took our flashlights, and with an Egyptian leading us, ventured into tomb after tomb, until in one, we had to get down on our knees to slip through a couple of passageways into the tomb chamber. This tomb was unbelievable, but what was in a side room deep in the tomb chamber took our breath and sent Vertis heading back to the entrance.

The floor of the side room to the tomb was covered in strips of mummy wrapping and bones were scattered everywhere. Our taxi driver-guide commented, “Tomb robbers; from probably hundreds of years ago. The village here has made their living robbing tombs for hundreds of years.”

Not the most spiritual Christmas day I have ever experienced. 

As I write this column, Christmas memories just seem to flood back, and a rather unusual one from elementary school is still on my mind. It had a lesson about Christmas that I haven’t forgotten.

I was back in school just after Christmas when Mrs. Newson, my fourth grade teacher, announced, “Class, I hope you have had a wonderful Christmas, and before we start class, I want each of you to stand up and tell what you got for Christmas.”

Well, that started an ‘I got more than you’ contest and kids were stretching those gifts like nothing you have ever heard, and shoot, I was too. I hated to admit my main present was a Sunday shirt, but I quickly jumped over that and rattled off everything else, even what was in my stocking. Heck, most of the class was just about like me, but I noticed Elizabeth, who sat at the desk right beside me was kinda hanging her head, and of course who we all knew her family was as poor as Job’s turkey, and I figured she didn’t get much.  I was the next to last in the class and Elizabeth was going to be last.

“Elizabeth what did you get for Christmas?” asked Mrs. Newson. I glanced over at Elizabeth, who still had her head lowered, and I watched her take a deep breath and slowly stand up. Then she raised her hand and said as she held up a plain, yellow pencil, “I got this pencil for Christmas.” It was so quiet, you could have heard a pin drop. That’s when I knew Christmas didn’t mean presents for everyone.