Keeping Christmas

Editor's note: Every year, as a gift to our readers, we commission a family holiday story from a treasured Minnesota author. Take a moment to read this aloud as you gather at the table or as the children are being bundled into bed.

My mother loves Christmas more than anybody else I know and all the years I was growing up along the Mississippi north of Minneapolis, back in the 1950s, she and I sat down on Christmas Eve and listened to "A Christmas Carol" on the radio, and when the ghosts were done haunting Scrooge and he woke up on Christmas and whooped for joy, my mother shared his feelings exactly. She was not a whooper herself but we could sense a great contentment in her. Especially the Christmas after Dad fell off the barn roof and bounced his head on concrete and was taken to Swedish Hospital in an ambulance with a fractured skull. We lived in a white house among the cornfields and potato farms of Brooklyn Park, Mother and Dad and us six kids, of whom I was the third, a shy, bespectacled kid in high-water pants and a home haircut and hand-me-down clothes, some from my older sister, including (yikes!) a pair of jeans that zipped up the side -- "They're only jeans!" Mother explained. Back then we always had several major blizzards by Christmas, back before children used spray deodorant with the Freon that knocked a hole in the ozone that led to global warming, but school never closed no matter what, which is why I am such a good speller, and children were hardier then and played hockey outdoors with old magazines for shinpads and our home was not overheated as homes are today -- whenever Dad could not see his own breath, he turned the furnace off. But never mind all that.

The day he fell off the barn roof, I got home from school to find Mother gone and a neighbor lady watching for me. "Your dad fell and split his head open," she said. "They took him to the hospital in an ambulance." She gave me a pitying look and stuck a Swanson's TV dinner in the oven for me and left me alone. The older kids were at their after-school jobs and the younger ones had been farmed out to the neighbors. Mother came home very late and sat down and had a cup of tea. "We may not be able to afford Christmas this year," she said. "I want you to know that so you don't get your hopes up."

I never had thought of Christmas as something you afforded or not; it was simply what happened. And I was hoping for all sorts of things, such as a pair of X-ray glasses, which I knew I wouldn't get because, according to the ad in Popular Mechanics, they enabled you to see through clothing. Ditto itching powder and a secret-agent radio and a periscope that could see around corners.

Mother was a worrier. She worried about us getting hit by cars or poking each other's eyes out or going astray and taking up worldly pleasures. She worried about drowning and the house burning down and about nuclear war, but faced with a real crisis, she was quite resolute. Dad came home a couple weeks before Christmas, pale, a little unsteady, but still Dad. Mother had bought him a green recliner chair and he reclined in it and dozed and we tiptoed around and were unnaturally quiet and polite, and meanwhile Christmas came closer and closer and there were few signs of it in our house.

And then one Sunday at church, on the table where the hymn books were stacked, I saw a shoebox with a hole in the top and on the side it said "Keillor Family Christmas Fund" and it shocked me -- the thought that we were Poor and Unfortunate and that people were donating money to buy us presents. The shame of accepting charity.

One night, walking home from Scouts, I took a shortcut across a cornfield where the snowdrifts were crusted hard and where sometimes we sailed on toboggans, with sails rigged out of Dad's dropcloths. I walked toward our house, its lights burning bright a quarter-mile away, a miniature house, as if I had walked into a model train layout and the North Coast Limited might come along, the sky full of stars and the ice on the river groaning and cracking and Minneapolis a hot glow on the horizon, and it dawned on me that whatever was in that house would be Christmas, whether the gifts were many or few, and as long as we were there together, that would be all we would need. I came home and Mother was baking cookies. The lights were strung on the tree and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir was singing. Dad was asleep. The thermostat was cranked up to 70. Christmas was in the house, the smell and sound of it, and from that comes all the rest.

Garrison Keillor is the host of "A Prairie Home Companion," a fiction writer, essayist and owner of Common Good Books in St. Paul.