When Jessica Bazzarre Byerly was 8 years old, her parents piled her and her two younger sisters into the family station wagon and set out for a Christmas tree farm in Havana, Illinois (population 2,827), where Byerly’s dad used to go as a kid.
“My parents both thought that cutting down your own Christmas tree was something they wanted their kids to experience at least once,” Byerly explained, “like they had with their parents.”
Problem was, things had changed a bit over the years.
“Instead of a lively farm, there were trees along a U-shaped lane,” Byelry recalls. “The trees had already been cut down and they were being held upright with a stake in the back. There wasn’t even anyone there to greet us. Just a cash box like you see with the roadside fruit stands.”
Not about to have their holiday merriment snuffed out by some banal efficiency, Byerly’s parents locked eyes. A wordless plan (children were listening in the back seat, after all) was hatched.
“We drove along the lane and picked out a tree,” Byerly recalls. “My dad got out his axe and made a big production of cutting it down while we watched with great excitement. I thought my dad was quite the woodsman since he cut down the tree down so easily.”
Many years passed before Byerly and her sisters learned the truth, that her dad “cut down” a pre-cut tree. At that point, the story became a bit of a family legend. (Rightly so.) She shared part of the legend with me in a Facebook comment after I wrote a recent column about my own Christmas tree adventures. I tracked her down for more details.
“As an adult,” she told me, “I am always grateful to my parents for trying to make our Christmas magical when we were kids, whatever the circumstances.”
It’s one of my favorite things — maybe the favorite thing — about the holidays: the lengths that grown-ups go to so kids can feel wonder and magic and awe. Feelings that get harder to capture, harder to believe in, harder to make space for as we get older.
I asked readers for more stories.
“We were Air Force kids and spent a few years stationed in Sacramento when we were in early elementary school,” Jennie Korb Waldorf wrote. “We had previously lived in the Midwest, so our first winter in California my sister and I were talking about how we wished it would snow at Christmas. On Christmas Eve my mom called us over to the sliding glass door leading out to the backyard. My dad was up on the roof with a bag of flour, making it snow by sprinkling it onto the ground a little at a time.”
Nora Walsh Kerr offered this: “I wanted a little purple boombox when I was a kid and after we had all opened gifts, my dad pointed out the window and there was one box out in the snow with what looked to be reindeer hoof prints around it. That moment is forever in my memory as the year that one of the most treasured gifts fell out of Santa’s sleigh.”
The care it took to think of — and then execute — reindeer hoof prints is almost more than my heart can take.
“My husband rented a beautiful Santa suit and asked a friend to come over at midnight,” Dawn Henninger Lantero wrote. “We woke our four children up so they could look down the stairs and see Santa’s back as he placed a few gifts under the tree. Then we shooed them back to bed. The next day the stories just kept growing. I’ll never forget them running into Grandma and Grandpa’s house yelling to their cousins that Santa is real.”
Of course, adult hearts deserve to be awed as well.
“My mom always made cards when she was alive for family birthdays and holidays,” Genene Murphy wrote. “She’d write a note in perfectly scripted cursive and I imagine each card took her a half hour alone to make. After she died, I unexpectedly received similarly made cards, with the same perfectly scripted cursive, from Peggy, a friend of mom’s I’ve never met. Those cards landed on my birthday, holidays and on mom’s birthday and the day she died too. She’d tell me a funny story about my mom at Bible study, or that one time at lunch when my mom’s laughter filled the room. She’d also share things my mom told her, like how she was proud of me.
“That was five years ago. And I still get those cards,” Murphy wrote. “Peggy, like my mom if she were alive, is in her 80s now. And it’s her consistency, when holidays are hard, that remains the best and most unexpected gift I could know.”
Spreading the joy
If you would like to instill a little magic, consider donating a gift to a child whose mother is incarcerated. The Moms United Against Violence and Incarceration toy drive, which I wrote about last year, is back, organizer Holly Krig confirms. Since 2014, the group has collected and distributed about 1,500 gifts to jails and rehabilitation centers across Illinois.
It works like this: You choose a toy or teen gift at https://www.target.com/gift-registry/gift/holidaysolidarity11 and add it to your online cart. For shipping address, you choose “shipping to the address on Holiday Solidarity Moms United’s Community Registry.” Gifts are shipped directly to the designated facility, where staff members open and inspect them. Then volunteers set up the gifts for moms to choose among and present to their children during a supervised visit.
“This is a way of showing incarcerated parents that we see them and we understand that they’re still parents,” Krig said, “and that it’s important to do something as simple as giving a gift to their child.”
Because sometimes something simple is actually everything.
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