The little Christmas Crib

My first memory of Christmas, a memory not prompted or aided by a photograph, is set in the front room of Oma and Opa’s farmhouse on Marion Road on the fringe of the Sumas prairie. It was a very simple house, and small, though I only realized this after I was grown. My grandparents had 10 children and when I was a child the house always had room for all.

It must have been Christmas Day, or perhaps Boxing Day, because the house was full of aunts and uncles and cousins, many who lived far away in Vancouver and would have come to the farm for the family gathering. I must have been about four.

I know I was quite young because the memory is not an ordered recollection but rather, scattered and disconnected. Frederick Buechner has said that a small child knows time only by its quality, and so, while many of the details are blurred, moments of that day are clear. Most of all, I recall the sensations. They include love, contentment, and joy.

The room is warm, heated further by bodies so that droplets form on the winter cold window and drizzle down the glass pane like glazed icing. I cuddle on a familiar lap as the adult chatter, laughter, and the warmness lull me to the borders of slumber, my lazy eyelids growing heavier until finally they fall softly, merging light with dark, forming shadowy dreams behind them. Perhaps the excitement of Christmas tires me the way anticipation and activity tires all little ones. I squirm and wrestle with my drowsiness, however, blink back sleep, then awaken. Have I missed the gift opening?

The memory is like a jigsaw puzzle with pieces missing, but the next recollection is added to the first and summons the long forgotten wonder of being four or so, still innocent and free of expectations.

I experience genuine delight. Something is brought out and seems intended just for me. I don’t remember if it’s wrapped and I don’t recall if my other cousins are in the room. In my mind the moment is mine and I’m in the centre of it. I feel so special as I receive the wonderful gift – a little wooden handmade doll’s crib, painted white – especially for me!

In the decades following that farmhouse Christmas, we have celebrated many more times as an extended family, and though the years have crafted change, the memories endure. Opa has been gone for almost 25 years, Oma five, and I have heard that the old farmhouse burned to ashes a while ago. When I recently drove by, I saw another family’s new house in its place.

The Christmas season is a natural occasion to reflect on the people, places, and experiences etched in our consciousness. Christmas comes on the calendar each year and naturally bookmarks the pages of our life story. Families gather at Christmas, and the first Christmas was a family occasion – the birth of Jesus, a child to Joseph and Mary.

But families gather as imperfect, temporal creatures and so, Christmas is a time that is poignant, and also painful. Married couples fall out of love. Unresolved conflicts among brothers and sisters, or parent and child, are as chasms where no bridge exists. Where death has claimed a member, absence is a penetrating void.

One turns to pleasant memories for comfort. Memories of special Christmases, of loved ones, of happier times, become precious treasures.

Yet such remembrances alone cannot encompass the essence and wonder of Christmas. Nor is wonderment contained only in the days gone by, lest we render Christmas merely nostalgic and sentimental, “just like the ones I used to know” (or so the carol goes).

Christmas is infinitely more, and the wonder of it transcends two millennia, for it is the manger in Bethlehem that holds the essence and wonder of Christmas. The angel said, “I bring you good news of great joy that will be for all the people. Today in the town of David a Savior has been born to you; he is the Messiah, the Lord. This will be a sign to you: You will find a baby wrapped in cloths and lying in a manger” (Luke 2:10–12).

Jesus, God’s own Son, became human and entered the world that we might have a personal relationship with God as God’s very own child.

I pray that the wonder of Christmas will be renewed within me. And, as I recollect the family gathering at the farmhouse long ago, it seems fitting that my earliest Christmas memory is of a little wooden crib.

Connie Braun attends Northview Community Church, Abbotsford, B.C.