The real miracle of Christmas

The Boston Herald

BEVERLY BECKHAM

I walk down the cellar stairs and dig through boxes, unlabeled, packed in haste, the creche wrapped among Christmas glasses rimmed in green, and find the Santa Clauses, finally.

The musical ones I wind up. Two play "Santa Claus is Coming to Town," but my favorite, a ceramic St. Nick with kind, blue eyes, plays "Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas," and I sing along to the thin, tinny notes.

"Have yourself a merry little Christmas, make the yuletide bright. Next year all our troubles will be out of sight."

"Next year" is how my mother sang this song. "From now on" are the real words but "next year" is what I heard and what I remember. "Next year all our troubles will be miles away."

"Next year, we'll celebrate Christmas in a brand new house," she said when we lived on Calvin Street in Somerville. I was 6 and didn't know, yet, about "next year." I thought life was perfect just the way it was. We had a whole extra unheated room just for a Christmas tree. We didn't have to move furniture and buy a little tree that would be stuffed in some corner. We didn't have to wait until a few days before Christmas to put up our tree because we had the radiator shut off in our empty room and a tree wouldn't shrivel and die there.

I watched my father drill holes in the bare spots on the trunk of a long skinny thing he dragged up three flights of steps. I watched as he sawed off the bottom of the tree, stuck the slender top in a bucket full of sand, then used branches from the discarded part to fill in the holes.

He strung lights on the tree, fat orange and red and green bulbs, and I hung ornaments. And after hours of work, there it was, finally, tall and lean and beautiful: Christmas in bloom.

I sat, a blanket wrapped around me, and knew that this was the best Christmas tree ever, and that we would have the best Christmas day ever, and there would never be another that could compare.

But then came the next year.

We had a softer, fuller tree in the new house in Randolph, because my father really did have a knack with trees. He could turn the scraggiest looking evergreen into a postcard beauty with his drill and his patience. And that's what he did. That year he did have to cram it into a corner, but, oh how perfect it looked. We added artificial icicles, long crystal things that looked like the shimmery glass baubles on my grandmother's living room lamp, and strands of tinsel, which I got to put on.

And when this tree was finished, when the star had been placed at the top, I sat on the couch in front of it and announced, "This is the best Christmas tree ever, Dad." And I knew that it would be the best Christmas day ever, too. And it was.

There were many perfect Christmases, one right after the other, all the time I was a child, because I was a child and didn't know anything more than what went on in front of me.

I didn't know that my grandmother didn't talk to her sister. I didn't know that where my grandmother would spend Christmas day was a continual source of friction between my mother and her sister. I didn't know about family feuds and petty gripes and pay checks that didn't stretch far enough and toys left on store shelves and hurt feelings and babies that died before they were born and dreams that never came true.

I didn't know that for my mother and for most adults, "next year" was the hope on which they hung their dreams. Next year, maybe everyone will get along. Next year, maybe everyone will be well. Next year, maybe things will be better.

But there is only this year, I think, as I carry the Santas up the stairs and place them in a wood and glass cabinet in the front hall. Next year there will be other troubles, troubles with different names, troubles in different sizes, but troubles nonetheless.

A child celebrates Christmas without thinking about “next year.” One of the multiple miracles of Christmas is that despite all the troubles and problems and deferred dreams, adults continue to celebrate and believe in Christmas , too.