“May I Lick the Spoon?”

by ProfDave, ©2021 

(Dec. 30, 2021) — This Christmas was a time of remembering for me.  What do you remember of Christmas past?  Is it bittersweet?  As we grow older, more and more that was dear to us is gone or changed.  It seems all the grown-ups in our lives are dying off and it’s just us kids left!  Or is it just bitter – holidays rent with family conflict and/or substance abuse and disappointment?  Nearly all the men I know well have father issues – fathers who weren’t there, were abusive, or withheld approval.  Our comprehensive need of family nurture and socialization – the foundation of our lives – reaches its peak of expectations at times like Christmas.  So much could and did go wrong.  Bad things happened in December.

Christmas in the Heughins parsonage (I’m a preacher’s kid) is a mostly sweet memory – except of course that I can’t go back (no one ever held me like my mother did – and I sure could use some warm softness now!).  We were as poor as church mice.  In fact, we were church mice.  Dad took churches no one else could afford to serve and we lived pretty much on rural parishioners’ in-kind donations – garden vegetables, live chickens, an occasional load of wood.  But I can’t remember ever being hungry or cold.

There were the three of us, living upstairs over the church in Montgomery, VT.  Gifts were relatively few and mostly practical.  Just about my earliest memory was toddling into the living room and catching my dad putting something behind the tree.  “It’s a broom!” I cried, as he tried to shush me.  Mom’s big present!  Another time I got into the groceries and found a package of strawberry flavored milk straws (!) and was paddled for peeking (not too hard, but unjustly – I thought): I didn’t know it was the week before Christmas).

The tree came from some parishioner’s wood lot.  Dad and I (when I was old enough) would go tramping into the snowy woods with an axe and select two spruce or fir trees, one for the church and one for ourselves.  They would be placed in grapefruit juice cans filled with sand and rocks and trimmed with tinsel, tin “icicles,” red garland and balls.  I remember when we got our first string of multi-colored lights and how I begged for a bubbler – because I saw them at someone else’s house.  After Christmas the trees would go out in the snowbank with suet tied to them for the birds.

The now-tattered cardboard fold-out manger scene that always graced a prominent place is still somewhere in storage.  Ma lit a candle in my bedroom window for the Christ child.  I remember watching it burn as she sang me to sleep.  I miss her!

Christmas in the Heughins parsonage was filled with music.  We didn’t have a “Victrola” when I was little, but Ma had a reed organ she had been given as a wedding present and she could play anything with strings or keys.  After dinner we would gather around the organ and sing Christmas carols from little booklets.  Dad sang melody and Ma and I sang alto.  No Santa, Rudolf or Frosty in those booklets, it was all the old Christ-carols with four moving parts.  I still love harmony! 

I was ambivalent about Santa Claus.  Dad preached (upstairs and downstairs) “keep Christ in Christmas” every season.  Nobody had heard of “happy holidays” back then.  The rival of Christ, in the lexicon of our church, was the jolly elf, no saint at all, but a pagan symbol of materialism!  Dad held that if they lied to me about Santa, then when the disillusionment came, I would cease believing in the Christ child, too.  They didn’t want me to outgrow Jesus!  On the other hand, my peers and teachers were all believers and Ma didn’t want me to make trouble.  She did read “The Night before Christmas” to me at bedtime on Christmas Eve.  So I wavered between entertaining belief and agnosticism.

We did hang a sock behind the oil stove, though, my actual sock – not one of those fake red felt sacks.  On Christmas morning I would bound out of my cold room to get dressed by the heat and find it stuffed with a real orange (the only time we had one all year), a pack of lifesavers, and a trinket or two to play with until time for “the tree.”  Ma might pretend she had nothing to do with it, but I knew I was supposed to say thank you.

In the Heughins parsonage, especially later in my childhood and adolescence, wrapping presents was a huge part of Christmas fun.  Except for care packages from a more prosperous aunt, most of the gifts were winter clothes and supplies (we didn’t know about back-to-school shopping in those days), but oh! the fun we had disguising them!  Gifts were placed under the tree as soon as ready and were designed for suspense and surprise.  Nothing was what it appeared!  Pick it up and shake it – go ahead.  You’ll never guess!

With an allowance of 25¢ (and no parental bankroll, it had to be from me), my gifts were small.  But they could be packaged in a huge box!  A toothbrush for Dad, wrapped in multiple layers of last-year’s wrapping paper and assorted boxes, a brick or two, and I could pack a small trunk!  It would take all day.  And he would respond – although he didn’t have all day to work on it – with an enormous raw carrot from the root cellar (I notoriously hated carrots).  My masterpiece came the year I went away to college and acquired six second-hand phonograph records for Ma.  I made them into the form of a box and packed it with newspaper and decoys.  She unwrapped and unfolded every piece in the “box” without discovering that the box itself was the present!  I think she was a little hurt for a minute or two that I had deceived her.

Christmas morning in the Heughins parsonage was a trial of patience.  The stocking, with its real orange, goodies and trinkets was supposed to help, but I found myself under the tree, poking and shaking packages while Ma cooked the special breakfast.

I’m trying to remember what we ate.  I know she outdid herself – and she was a trained cook – but my mind was elsewhere.  Probably waffles, made with a cast-iron waffle iron on the wood or kerosene stove.  Do you remember waffle irons?  It had three parts, a circular frame that fit over the stove-hole and two pan-like molds with handles that fit together.  You took the lid off the fire and put the contraption over the hole.  Ma greased both sides with lard, then poured the batter on one mold and closed the other over it.  When one side was done, she would flip it over in the hole and do the other.  Often, we had real maple syrup from the previous spring (this was Vermont) – as a teen, we made it ourselves in Maine.

Christmas day in the Heughins parsonage began – for me, at least – with the stocking, then a special breakfast.  But it still wasn’t time for the tree.  We had “family worship” every day after supper, but on this special day everything was ordered to enhance the meaning, as well as to extend and maximize the pleasure.  So, God first! 

Ma would read the Christmas story from the imitation parchment that came with our cardboard crèche [manger scene – in Britain “crèche” is any nursery].  It was King James version, Gothic font, Luke 2:1-18 and Matthew 2:1-12: Mary was “great with child” and the shepherds were “sore afraid” – powerful adjectives.  And, to my small mind, the Wisemen gave the first Christmas gifts.  Then Dad would lead us in a carol (usually “O come let us adore him”).

Incidentally, I found that script a few years ago and started using it with my grandchildren.  They count on it.

After setting the stage with the Christmas story and a Christmas hymn it was finally time for “the tree.”  Ma or Dad would pick up the first gift, read the tag aloud, and hand it to another – probably me.  I would try to guess what was in it.  While they watched, with joy and anticipation, I would carefully unwrap it – Ma saved the paper for next year.  And I would thank the giver if present.  Ma kept a list of thank you notes to be sent.  Most years we took turns passing out presents, one at a time, beginning with the smallest and working up.  It took a long time to open a few presents, but the point was to squeeze as much love, joy and gratitude out of each as possible.  Like Tiny Tim’s Christmas dinner, it was a feast!

In the Heughins parsonage, the gifts were hardly lavish, but we maxed out the enjoyment.  Christmas and birthdays were about the only times we got new stuff.  Even items that weren’t really new were pressed into service: like the carrot and the odd brick.  Sometimes the packaging was more fun than the gift.  There would be perhaps three to four simple toys. 

Someone might give us a box of chocolates and Aunt Thelma (or was it Uncle Harold?) was always good for a box of ribbon candy.  My parents knew about the law of diminishing returns: the second piece is half as good as the first, so just take one for maximum pleasure.  At the rate of one piece each, after Sunday dinners, the ribbon candy often lasted until the next Christmas and every loop was fully appreciated!

Ma pulled out all the stops on Christmas dinner, too, but she served reasonable amounts.  There would be a chicken.  Soft-hearted Dad hated when it was donated alive.  He had to whack its head off one-handed with an axe on a stump in the shed.  One time he missed and had to catch the wounded bird and do it again.  The decapitated chicken would run and flop around – well – like a chicken with its head cut off.  Then Ma would have to dip the carcass in boiling water and singe it in the flame over the stove in order to pluck it.  I really enjoyed helping her disassemble the body.  Take a foot, for example: if you pulled on the tendon it would wave at you!  Thought I might be a doctor someday – until I discovered that I fainted at the sight of blood.

Dessert was special.  In addition to the usual pie and Christmas cookies, Ma made a Christmas pudding.  No, not a “figgy pudding,” so far as I can remember, but it was baked in a tin can and came out of the oven steaming – just like in The Christmas Carol.  It was dark, sticky and very sweet, served with a pasty white sauce.  It had bread and molasses in it.  And yes, I got to help cut out the cookies, too.  I especially liked the filled cookies: two layers of dough with jam in the middle.  Yum.  “May I lick the spoon?”

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David W. Heughins (“ProfDave”) is Adjunct Professor of History at Nazarene Bible College.  He holds a BA from Eastern Nazarene College and a PhD in history from the University of Minnesota.  He is the author of Holiness in 12 Steps (2020).  He is a Vietnam veteran and is retired, living with his daughter and three grandchildren in Connecticut.