Stories of Christmases Past Make Gifts Worth Sharing

Several of them started their stories the same way.

“Oh, this isn’t very important,” they said. Or, “This probably isn’t very interesting to anyone else.”

And then they proceeded to take the microphone that was being passed around among them at the Villa Valencia retirement home and tell a Christmas story. Some were in wheelchairs, others in regular chairs. Several were stroke victims; at least one stoked up on oxygen before joining the conversational circle.

Most are in their 80s or 90s, and they have to struggle to keep life and its memories from fading into the distant shadows. One way to stay sharp, to stay healthy, is to exercise their minds.

And so they recalled Christmases past.

“I really don’t talk very well,” Glad Gray said. She is 92. “I’m going to tell you about the first Christmas I remember. I was a very little girl, and my sister was very little too. Grace and I were very small. Mother made a suit for Santa, and I knew him, I knew him till I was 8 years old. Kids came from all over the neighborhood. It was a jolly, jolly evening to remember as long as I live.”

Bob Hill, 75, and in a wheelchair, was next. “I remember only that I was about 5 or 6, and I was curious about what I was getting for Christmas, of course. So I waited until my parents went to bed. We lived out in the country, with a pot-bellied stove in the dining room with the tree beside it.”

Hill said he crept down from his upstairs bedroom and began sorting through the unwrapped presents. Unfortunately, he heard a creak from a footstep and realized his father was heading for the room. Young Bob tried to hide in his favorite spot in the kitchen, but his father found him and dispatched him to bed. But not without the information: “I woke up my brother and told him everything he was going to get for Christmas.”

Signa Lafors had been showing album pictures before the storytelling began. She came from a Swedish family of six girls and six boys. Now 90, she recalled the time her sister Klara, then 40, played Santa Claus. Everything was fine, she said, until one of the children said, “He has the same earrings as Aunt Klara! There’s something wrong here.”

Evelyn Marley is the activities director at Villa Valencia, which provides both housing and care for its residents. Part of the center’s challenge is keeping the seniors mentally alert. “It’s an ongoing task,” she said. “If we’re able to keep them functioning mentally, we seem to see a correlation in their physical abilities to either recuperate or stay healthy, and in their emotional outlook. The more they keep busy, the better off they are, and they’re less apt to get depressed.”

Jane Ryan is 82. “I was born in a small town in Pennsylvania in the Allegheny Mountains,” she began, adding that virtually everyone in town was German-Catholic. She recalled wanting to grow up to be 14 so she’d be old enough to stay awake for midnight Mass at Christmas. In her mind’s eye, she still recalls the priests’ flowing robes of gold and silver.

But that isn’t what she remembers most. It was being “initiated” as a teen-ager by her family with a shot of whiskey and beer. She took a drink of whiskey and “coughed and spit the whole thing out.” Her relatives gave her a cracker and insisted she wash it down with a swig of beer. “We had five breweries in a town of fifteen-hundred people,” she said. “I tasted the beer and it wasn’t as bad as the whiskey, but I haven’t had any beer to this day.”

With a comic’s touch, she paused just long enough as her friends laughed before adding: “I’ll drink gin or vodka, but no beer. And I don’t like whiskey.”

They kept their stories short, because that was the order of the day, but maybe because as Signa Lafors said, “I can’t remember so much now that I had this stroke a few years ago.”

But while their world may be darkening, it’s strangely comforting that they can still dip into their childhoods of 80 years ago and remember pot-bellied stoves beside the Christmas tree, their mother making a suit for Santa, a child’s sense of delight.

The elderly always have lessons to teach the young. What these folks seemed to be saying was that the simplest stories, the purest tales, are the ones that stick with you for a lifetime.

Once you get to that point where you’re no longer trying to impress anyone, isn’t it interesting what stories we choose to tell?

*

Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Readers may reach Parsons by writing to him at The Times Orange County Edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, Calif. 92626, or calling (714) 966-7821.