The Window Grandma Opened on Christmas Eve

Christmas Eve on Fourth Street

We lived in half of a duplex on Fourth Street in Centerville that winter, twenty miles away. Two bedrooms. A kitchen you could stand in the middle of and touch both counters. A little artificial tree on the end table with a string of lights that only half worked.

I was embarrassed, pulling into that driveway with my grandmother in the passenger seat. Grandma had a farmhouse with a dining room that sat fourteen. I had a card table and four folding chairs.

Grandma did not seem to notice. She walked in, took off her coat, hung it on the back of my kitchen door like she lived there, and looked around.

“Well,” she said. “Isn’t this cozy. Where do you keep your pans?”

We had the cheesy potatoes. I found a frozen pizza in the freezer, and a can of green beans, and half a jar of cranberry sauce from Thanksgiving. Grandma found a box of Jiffy corn muffin mix in the back of my cupboard that I did not know I owned and had it in the oven before I had my boots off.

Lily set the card table. She put a paper towel at every place, folded into a triangle, the way Grandma Bev does napkins.

Then, very carefully, she set a clothespin angel at every place. Hers. Mine. And one at Dan’s empty chair.

“He can have it when he gets home,” she explained.

Grandma had to go stand at the sink for a minute after that.

We ate at six. Grandma said grace, the same one she has said my whole life, the short one about thankful hearts. Lily held her hand on one side and mine on the other.

The pizza was a little burnt on the bottom and the potatoes had gotten cold in the car and had to go back in the oven, and it was, I think, the best Christmas Eve supper I have ever eaten.

Halfway through, Lily asked Grandma what Christmas was like when she was a little girl.

So Grandma told her about 1941, the winter she was seven, the winter her daddy had pneumonia and could not work. There was no money for a tree that year and no money for presents, and her mother told the children not to expect anything.

“So my daddy got up out of his sickbed on Christmas Eve,” Grandma said, “against everybody’s advice, and walked out to the fencerow with a hatchet and cut the scraggliest little cedar you ever saw. And my mother strung it with popcorn and pages cut out of the Sears catalog. Paper chains. And do you know what?”

Lily shook her head, eyes huge.

“I don’t remember one single store-bought present I ever got in my whole life,” Grandma said. “But I remember that cedar tree. I’m ninety-one years old and I can still smell it.”

She looked across at her good coat on the back of the kitchen door, the angel still pinned to the lapel.

“People remember who came out in the cold for them,” she said. “That’s the only thing they remember.”