A Most Brotherly Christmas
/The Boston Herald
It stands out now because it stands alone. Last week, all the houses in the neighborhood where I walk had wreaths on the doors and lights in the windows. Now the lights are gone and the wreaths, if they're there, hang in the dark.
Only one house still has lights in the windows, and on every bush and hanging from the roof.
This house is an echo. Christmas isn't past, it says. Unopened gifts remain. Pine needles hide under the rugs. Poinsettias still bloom.
Miles away, in another town, it isn't a house that is echoing Christmas. It's words: "Merry Christmas, brother." Not "I love you," but the words mean the same. Miles away in another town, it's a Christmas story that is keeping the season alive.
"I have a story of how I spent my first Christmas with my brother in 73 years," Donald Colpitts wrote last weekend, while the rest of us were putting Christmas away.
Colpitts isn't putting Christmas away. He waited his whole life for this one.
"I was born in April 1929 and when I was 9 months old, my two brothers and two sisters were placed on a train to go live with my mother's parents in Tatamagouche, Nova Scotia. My two sisters returned to Lynn in 1937 and 1938, while my two brothers remained in Nova Scotia," he wrote.
"I first met my brothers, Howard and Walter, in Tatamagouche in 1947 when I was 18 years old." He didn't know until he was 15 that he even had these brothers.
Colpitts had a hard childhood. He didn't write this. He said this in an aside. That he lived through the Great Depression. That his father "disappeared in 1937." That on April 21, 1940, when he was 11, his mother took him to the Stetson Home for Boys in Barre, a home for orphans. And that he lived there until he was 16.
"My mother had one family and shipped them to Nova Scotia. Then she had us (Donald had younger siblings) and she put us in a home. She came up about once a year to visit," he says. "There were 35 boys and we all slept in one room. We got up at quarter to 5 every morning and worked until 7 at night. I ran the laundry.”
He met his older brothers for the first time when Walter was 28 and Howard was 29. "They were regular farmers. I went out to my brother Howard's. His wife, Winnie, had made bread and rolls and there was molasses on the table." To this day she bakes bread and puts molasses on the table whenever Donald and his wife, Lydia, visit.
Walter died in 1975 and at the funeral home Donald cried. "My reason? I didn't really know my brother Walter.”
Over the years, the remaining brothers have phoned and visited. But not once had they ever spent a Christmas together and this was Donald's dream. So this year, he and Lydia hopped on a plane and, with help from Howard's kids, surprised Howard and Winnie on Christmas Eve.
They called on a cell phone from Howard's driveway. "Merry Christmas, Winnie. Tell Howard to go look out the door," Donald said.
And Donald did.
"That man looks like Donald," Howard said.
'That IS Donald," his wife replied.
And then there they were, two men hurrying toward each other. "Merry Christmas, brother," Donald yelled as they embraced.
The next day the brothers went to the cemetery where Walter is buried. Christmas was Walter's birthday. He would have been 83.
"It was perfect," Donald says. "This was the first Christmas that Howard and I spent together in my 73 years on Earth. This was the first time all three of us were together on Christmas Day."
