Christmas Memories #3

The year we moved back to New Jersey from the midwest I was twelve years old, my sister nine. For the first time in recorded history it seemed that we lived close enough to my grandparents to go and spend Christmas with them. When I say grandparents I mean my grandmother Gallison in Vanceboro, Maine, and my grandmother Hill in Saint Stephen, New Brunswick, Canada, for by the time I was twelve both of our grandfathers had died.

Granny's House

But which grandmother should we spend the actual Christmas day with? They lived only thirty miles apart, but it was thirty miles of snow-covered dirt road. What we did ultimately was to follow the route we always followed on our summer visits, north from Bangor through the woods to Vanceboro, where we would stay with Ma, and then across the river and off to Saint Stephen to stay with Granny.

Thing was, it wasn't summer. My father knew perfectly well what he was getting into; he grew up in Vanceboro. So as we set out on the last leg of our journey he had the tire chains with him. In the trunk of the car. Night fell, and so did the snow, thick and fast, as we headed into the dread Tomah Woods. All my life I had heard of the horrors of the Tomah Woods, for the Gallisons were not enthusiastic outdoorsmen, though they lived at the farthest outposts of civilization and had been known to work as camp cooks. The Tomah Woods were menacing, it was said, full of kill-crazed moose, runaway logging trucks, mountain lions. And yet there we were, driving through it.

Actually it was darker
than this, and also
nearly vertical

Visibility grew worse, the snow deeper. My father drove more and more slowly. No one else was on the road. It got to be two in the morning; my mother and sister were asleep in the back seat. I was supposed to talk to my father and keep him awake, as I remember. Finally we stopped halfway up a steep hill, the wheels spinning. We could go no further without the chains.

My father had to back down the hill to the nearest flat place.

There was a garage at the foot of the hill, possibly the only building for fifty miles in any direction, but the people who worked there were nowhere to be seen and they had turned out the lights before they left. Still, in front of it was a flat place. While my mother and sister continued to sleep my father laid out the chains, just so, backed over them the way you're supposed to and fastened them on. No creatures came out of the shadowy darkness to get us, but that's not to say they weren't watching.

How I admired my father. What a hero. What a competent person. Of course his mother, waiting by her wood stove in Vanceboro, expected no less. He had told her he would get us there that night, and he did.

Ma

In every little town in Washington County there is a woman called Ma by everyone, as a term of respect. In Vanceboro that woman was my grandmother. She was still up when my father pulled the car into the barn, which was attached to the house in the manner of Maine barns. It smelled of cordwood, piled to the ceiling against the coming winter, and of kerosene and machine oil. We stumbled the length of the barn, over the worn linoleum in the shed, and into the warm kitchen where Ma welcomed us, fed us a snack and sent us to bed. She had put up a tree in the parlor and decorated it with amazing fiberglass angel hair. The next day we had Christmas. We found our stockings hung on the clothesline in front of the kitchen wood stove, for there was no mantel.

And that was our Christmas at Ma's house, playing happily with our new toys, stuffing ourselves with treats. Tomorrow I'll tell you about Christmas at Granny's house. But I won't tell you which Christmas fell on the twenty-fifth of December, because I don't think I ever knew.