A Christmas Memory

My grandmother was a native New Mexican who barely spoke English. She attended a tiny Spanish speaking church in her neighborhood built of adobe bricks by the pastor who lived on the same property. My family went to church with her only a handful of times in my early life, but the last time we went together was at Christmas.

My sisters and I were invited to participate in the classic Christmas pageant. I was eight or nine years old at the time, and spoke only about eight or nine words of Spanish, but we memorized our lines in English from the story of the Nativity told in the second chapter of Luke.

We wore angel wings, and tinsel crowns, and carried butterflies inside at the thought of facing a room full of mostly strangers who sang carols in a different tongue of impossible familiarity.

 My part was verse eight through fourteen. Passages which have never left me: "And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night. . . ."

  

I remember little else except relief at being done, and flinging off the bed sheet of an angel costume after it was all over. We would have met later at my grandmother's house for food, which one Christmas included a roasted goat, its whole head ceremoniously planted on the table.

Without question, that year is among my most vivid childhood memories of Christmas. My father died of illness not long after. Though we saw my grandmother regularly, we never again went to the little country church.

My tiny grandmother (five feet tall, with a long salt and pepper braid wrapped around her head) lived to ninety-four, after two marriages, eighteen children, of which my father was the first, and many, many grandchildren. I never had a real conversation with her. She was a quiet person, as shy of my speech as I was of hers.

But I wonder whatever became of old Senor Gutierrez's church, (adobe structures have a way of simply melting into the ground), and his lovely kind-faced wife who shepherded us into their own flock that year, and offered up a Christmas memory to last a lifetime. . . .

I'm off soon to visit my own grandchildren.
 I hope you're making merry! And making memories too!

Ciao! for now!

Jacqueline

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