Christmas traditions

I stopped to photograph this Madonna and Child at a small village church during one of our weekend rambles through the Eifel Mountains. (Don Dale 1967 photo)

I loved Christmas as a child, and I've kept much of that enthusiasm as an adult.

I remember the intensity of the excitement from when I was small, back when I truly believed in Santa Claus. It was magical -- just as it's meant to be. When I got older, I explored the more serious side of the holiday. From about the age of 7 or 8, I played a child of Bethlehem in the annual pageant at Fairmount Methodist Church. My mom helped make the costumes, and my dad made the halos for the angels out of tinsel, wire, and glow-in-the-dark paint.

When I was about 14, I joined the volunteer cast of the annual Nativity pageant at the Carillon in Byrd Park. For the first few years, I played one of a handful of slaves being beaten by Roman soldiers. By the time I left Richmond for the Air Force, I had graduated to being a Roman soldier. (Age has its perks.) We volunteers returned year after year, and seeing each other for the rehearsal and then the Christmas-Eve performance was the real start of the holidays.

Christmas dinner when I was a child was usually at either our house or at my Aunt Annie's. Both women were good Southern cooks, taught by my grandmother, who usually pitched in with at least one dish. Their holiday menus were much the same, although each year there'd be talk in the kitchen about a different take on one tradition or another - but they never messed with the basics: the turkey, the gravy (giblets, but no gizzard), the dressing (cornbread with sausage), the candied yams (thick brown-sugar syrup), the cranberry sauce (Ocean Spray) and the pickle tray. They'd usually experiment with the vegetables -- creamed peas with pearl onions, Durkee's green bean casserole with mushroom soup and french fried onions, creamed spinach or some such. My father was in charge of making the Waldorf salad from scratch. We kids would shell the nuts for him.

I've had my share of good Christmases, with a few bad ones thrown in to teach me the difference. Some that could have been bad were not. I was fired from WTVR TV a week before Christmas in 1977. I was jobless, but that holiday turned out to be a good one. The support from friends and colleagues at work was overwhelming and full of good cheer.

My first Christmas in Germany -- my first away from home -- was also a good one. I missed my family, but we went to midnight services at St. Peter's in Bitburg, and on Christmas Day we had a jolly traditional Christmas dinner in the hospital chow hall, with turkey and steamship round of beef carved to order. And there were parties in almost every room in the barracks at one time or another.

The hard Christmases marked the absence of immediate family members: the first without my father's Waldorf salad, the first after my sister died, and the first without my mother's cooking.

Nowadays, I have Christmas dinner with my niece Terry and my nephew Mike and their families at Mike's house. Mike and his wife, Becky, live in the house where his parents and grandparents once lived. Becky's mother, Louise, provides continuity from her side of the family. Becky and Terry are both excellent cooks, and the food is always splendid.

But what's far more valuable to me is the gathering itself. Traditions continue. Life changes, yet stays the same. The great nieces and nephew and the great-great niece keep the holiday focus where it should be, on the young. And it makes me very happy to be present.

So here's a merry Christmas wish for you all for 2009.