Early 1950s, several cities and highways across the US

By Ah-de, as told to Charmie Gholson

My dad had a habit of losing jobs. Or changing jobs. It was always a great mystery why we moved so much. We’d be living some place and all of sudden we were packing to move.

When we moved, we were not allowed to get phone calls from people we had known. If we got letters, we were never allowed to read them. He’d tear them up. He said it was best to burn your bridges. Don’t look back. Whichever town we were living in at the time, my dad would always say to us as we were driving away, “Take a good look around you. Remember what you see because you’ll never see this place again.”

In the early ’50s I was 16 and we were living in Arkansas. I was in high school. I’d already been in 17 different schools because of all the moving. So here came the news again; time to move. I was older this time, we’d been living there since I was 15 and I had a lot of close friends. I felt like, here it is happening all over again but it’s worse this time. It was in the fall and school was just starting again. The leaves were dying and here all the friendships were going to die too.

We packed up and moved from Arkansas to Tacoma, Washington. We rented a house and got set up. Most of the boxes were unpacked. We were there about 3 weeks and then one day dad came home from work and he and my mom talked by themselves in the kitchen. Mom came out and she had tears in her eyes and said, “It’s time to pack. We’re leaving.”

I said, “Why? What happened?” and she said, “Well, it just didn’t work out.”

I asked if we were going to go back to where we came from she said no, we don’t have enough money. We’d spent a lot of money to move. We asked where we were going to live and Mom said, “I don’t know.”

It was me, my youngest sister (who was mentally and physically challenged), another sister and her husband, and my mom and dad.

My dad said we could only keep what we could carry in our laps, everything else had to go. We put a moving sale sign out and started selling stuff fast.

Someone bought my mom’s Maytag washer. It had rollers on the 4 legs and my brother and I rolled it down the street to the person’s house who bought it. I remember being really sad. My mom had always wanted one and really liked it.

It was really a scary time in our lives. I never found out what happened to dad’s job. It was something that wasn’t talked about but he was very sick. He couldn’t work at all. Looking back, I think he was depressed. He cried a lot and couldn’t work, so me and my brother-in-law and my sister would find little odd jobs to earn $5 or $2. I would go into stores and ask for leftover bread to eat.

We were living in our car. It was an old Mercury, a four-door. We drove it around and parked in parking lots. We couldn’t let the car run for long because dad was trying to get money for gas to go back to Kentucky, where we knew people.

My sister and I found a woman who said we could live in her basement. She said we could have it for $5 a month. Only part of the floor had concrete on it. There was a light bulb hanging from a cord on the ceiling and a really old cast iron wood burning stove. We didn’t have any firewood so I would sneak out at night and steal wood from the neighbors’ yards.

I wanted privacy but we just had the two rooms so I made my bedroom in the back in the coal bin. I managed to flatten the top of the coal off and put a bunch of rags on top of it and make a bed. It was off the floor. I could cover up with rags or newspapers. It was pretty warm, pretty nice. It sure beat the car; at least I could stretch out.

By doing odd jobs, picking up pop bottles and getting two cents a piece for them, we finally saved up enough money to buy us enough gas to make it back to Kentucky where we had some relatives. We made ready to leave. It was probably two or three days before Christmas.

We got on the highway and started heading back. By the morning of Christmas Eve we made it to a teeny little town. We were so cold, so we went to a motel. I don’t remember the name of the town but I do remember the name of the motel, it was called the Circle C Motel. I asked the owner if there was any way we could do work or chores so we could sleep in the motel one night.

They gave us some odd jobs to do, probably just out of the goodness of their hearts because it really wasn’t that much work. They allowed us to spend the night and we had a place to sleep other than the car.

I was determined that no matter what we were going have some kind of Christmas. I think we had about $4 or $5 and I finally talked my folks into buying Christmas presents for each other. They agreed but said we had to buy practical gifts.

My dad and I were looking scraggly with beards, and so the two of us got to share a gift. We split a can of BermaShave. One of my sisters was starting her period and didn’t have any kotex so I bought her a box. The packaging from our gifts had bright colors on it, so we asked the motel owners for scissors and thread and used the packages for paper. My sisters and brother-in-law and I cut Christmas stars and Christmas designs out of the papers and we took the thread and hung them up.

Well, I was wishing we had a Christmas tree so I asked the owners of the motel if I could cut some branches from their Evergreen trees. They said they had cut the top off their Christmas tree because it was too tall and we could have that.

I dragged it back to the room. It was little, maybe 3 feet tall, but I put it on top of a pedestal ashtray in the room and made it look a lot taller. Then we took those decorations we’d made and hung them all over the tree. We even cut out a little angel and set her on the top.

So it looked really nice ya know, and it kind of helped me to not think about how hungry I was. But pretty soon I said lets drive around and see if we can find something good to eat. It was late, probably about 9 p.m. on Christmas Eve.

We went driving around looking at decorations on other people’s yards. I spotted a restaurant that was closed but the people were still in there mopping up the place. I told my dad to stop the car and walked over to the window and knocked. They said, “We’re closed.”

I said, “We’re hungry. We’re homeless and we’re traveling, do you have anything you’re throwing away that’s not bad that we could eat?” I said, “I can work for it, you know, help you mop the floor if we can have any of that food.”

The lady said wait a minute and went back and talked to the owner, then she came back and said, “Go tell you family in the car to come in.”

My dad was real nervous. He wasn’t sure we should do it. But we went in and they had taken chairs down from one of the tables and set them up and turned on some of the lights. They sat us in the back, close to the kitchen.

I could smell the food and oh it smelled good. Pretty soon all the people who were working there came out together and they served our table. They gave each one of us a great big plate of hot roast beef sandwiches — two pieces of bread, beef and brown gravy all over it, mashed potatoes and vegetables. Then they gave each one of us a glass of milk and a piece of pumpkin pie.

They stood around us and talked to us and it was so wonderful. It was warm and they made sure we had as much to eat as we could possibly hope for. And then we had our pie. They wished us a merry Christmas and we thanked them and went back to the little Circle C Motel. I talked my mom and dad and sisters and brother-in-law into singing Christmas carols. I insisted that we sit on the beds, we were piled everywhere, and we sat around that room and sang Christmas carols before we went to bed.

The next morning the sun came up and was sparkling on the snow. It was blowing around on the ice and on the roadway and yard. It was gorgeous, absolutely gorgeous. I thought, wow. What a beautiful Christmas day.

We had some wishes for each other for a good Christmas, then we opened our presents. It was so fun. It was the simples, barest Christmas we had ever had, but it was probably the best.

It was down to the bare essentials because we realized that we had all the stuff that we really, really needed. We had each other. We had eaten well. We’d been treated with kindness. We had been given a place to spend the night and now we were ready to get back on the road. And that was special.

I’ve always looked back on that feeling of hope I had that morning. I knew that no matter what, someday it was going to be OK and in fact, it was OK right then.

I somehow knew that I would never have a Christmas like that again, not another one could even come close to the power and meaning of Christmas and that is a very true thing. I’ve had a lot of wonderful Christmases since then but nothing’s ever equaled it. Since then I know that less is more. There has been more, but it was less.

Everything had seemed so hopeless, and then I had a sense of hope. The whole story of Christmas is about hope. It’s a spirit that somehow enters the hearts of people.

I remember thinking as we drove up the road that our family wasn’t so different than the family that started the Christmas tradition so long ago. We were not sleeping in mangers but I definitely could identify with Mary and Joseph and his baby. And it was almost a kinship, a close association with that fist Christmas family.

The hope that the story symbolizes for the whole world, the goodness of life, is found in the simple things. There hasn’t been a single year of my life that Christmas has come and gone that I don’t take just a few minutes to remember that. And always I’ve had a Christmas prayer for the people at the restaurant and the Circle C Motel.

I pray for them and their children, and their children’s children, that they will have happy lives, and that their needs will be met. And if they are ever hungry or in need, I pray that someone will take care of them. I’ve never looked back on it as a terrible experience. It was absolutely the best Christmas I’ve ever had.

Ah-de, also known as Ed Skinner, is a Cherokee elder who works as a counselor in Lenawee County, Michigan. He focuses on helping people find meaning in their lives, right where they stand. Charmie Gholson is a columnist, author, and radio show host, not to mention, at least according to the editors of Common Ties, a good listener.

Posted by Elizabeth Armstrong Moore on Monday, December 18th, 2006 | Email This Post

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