_Harriet Prescott Spofford_
They had always kept Christmas at home, even if in no very expensive
way. On the very last one, Johnny had had his skates, tied to his
stocking, and inside it, an orange and nuts and raisins, and some
little trick-joke, and a stick of candy; and Robby had had his sled,
and Marnie her book, and Bessie her tea-set; and Mr. Murtrie, the
father, had a pair of wristers that Nancy had crocheted, and a muffler
that his wife had knit; and the mother had a needle-book that Marnie
had made, and a bread-plate that Johnny had whittled out, and a piece
of jig-saw work from Robby, and a muff from the father. And Marnie had
written a poem to Father and Mother, which all the others criticized
violently and ruthlessly, but which was privately regarded as a great
achievement by every one of them.
But what was there to do here with sleds and skates! Great use for a
muff out in the middle of the Texas prairie, to which they had come
from the North. Why, yesterday the thermometer was just at summer heat,
and roses were blossoming!
At home how gay it was with every one coming and going, with purchases
and parcels and merry secrets, with the hanging of the green, with big
snow-drifts, and coasting down Long Hill by starlight, with going to
church in the forenoon, and coming home to turkey and cranberry sauce,
and a pudding in blue flames! Here there was nothing, there was nobody.
There wasn’t a shop within a hundred miles, and if there were, there
was no money with which to buy anything. For Mr. Murtrie had come to
grief in his business, losing, when all debts were paid, everything but
this ranch, to which he had brought his family, and where it seemed
like a new world.
At first, it had been so novel, no one thought of homesickness.
Nancy herself had enjoyed as much as any one the singing of the
mocking-birds at night, the flashing of the cardinal’s red wings in
the radiant mornings and the bubbling of his song, the fragrance of
the jasmines, the beauty of the innumerable flowers, the charm of the
wide landscape, the giant trees draped in their veils of gray moss;
she had enjoyed hearing the boys tell about the batcaves, with their
streams of unnumbered wings going out by dark and coming in by dawn
in myriads; she had enjoyed lying awake at night to hear the water
gently pouring through the irrigation ditches from the _madre_ ditch,
and drowning all the land in its fertilizing flood to the sound of
slow music; she had enjoyed watching the long flights of wild ducks;
seeing a spot apparently covered with yellow flowers that suddenly
turned into a flock of birds that rose and flew away. She had enjoyed
the strange cactus growths that seemed to her like things enchanted
in their weird shapes by old magicians; she had enjoyed the thickets
of prickly pear, the green and feathery foliage of the mesquit bushes,
many of them no higher than her head, but with mighty roots stretching
far and wide underground, the Indians having burned the tops in their
wild raids, year after year, long ago. But now Nancy was longing for
the bare branches of her old apple-tree weaving their broidery on the
sky, for the young oak by the brook which held its brown leaves till
spring, for the wide snow-fields, the shadows of whose drifts were blue
as sapphire. She was longing to hear the bells ring out their gladness
on Christmas eve and Christmas morning, for the spicy green gloom of
the church, for all the happy cheer of Christmas as she had known it.
Bells? There wasn’t a bell within hearing; there wasn’t a church,
except the ruins of an old Spanish mission three or four miles distant.
How could there be Christmas green where there wasn’t a spruce or a
fir! There was only this long, dreary prairie of the cattle-range under
its burning blue sky. It was the very kingdom of loneliness. Christmas
without snow, without an icicle, without whistling winds,--oh, it
wasn’t Christmas at all!
And then suddenly, as the angry words resounded and echoed in her mind,
she asked herself what made Christmas, anyway? Certainly it wasn’t the
things people did. In some places they kept it with blowing of horns
and burning of fire-crackers, as they did Fourth of July. Perhaps
in that way they expressed as much gladness as others did with the
pealing from belfries and the rolling of organ tones. For Christmas was
a time to be glad that Christ came to make all Christendom good, and
blessed, and happy.
And, just as suddenly, Nancy could not help asking herself what she was
doing to express gladness or to make Christmas happy. North pole or
south pole, Christmas was Christmas, and it wasn’t all in pleasure or
all in gifts; and she got out of bed, and knelt down and said a prayer,
and went to sleep in a better frame of mind.
But if it wasn’t all in pleasures or all in gifts, there must be _some_
gifts; and next day, Nancy set herself to thinking out the problem. It
was still some time before the great holiday, and every hour must be
improved.
For the first thing, she betook herself to one of the men on the range
who often came about the buildings; and he found for her several huge
horns, and, with his help, and taking Johnny into her confidence, they
took grease and brick-dust and scraped and polished these horns till
they shone almost like silver. Then the three dug for a big mesquit
root and secured one, at last, that grew from a great stock; and they
scraped and polished that into a very handsome piece of wood; and,
having a little knack of carpentry, they fitted the enormous horns into
the mesquit root, and there was a chair for any palace. It was to be
their father’s, and was to stand on the gallery, where, some night, the
night-blooming cereus that laced the whole front would open its slow,
delicious flowers, and shed the balm of heaven about him.
They found it a little difficult to keep this secret, because they
began work upon it before Mr. Murtrie went off on his hunting-trip with
some friends; but after he had gone, things were easier, as the mother
was not inclined to prowl about and look into everything, as the head
of a house sometimes thinks necessary.
And for the mother,--they knew where some tall flat grasses grew, near
a stream that was brimming at this season, and Johnny waded in and got
them. Nancy plaited them into a low work-basket, and lined it with a
bit of silk that had been her doll’s skirt in her day of dolls. The
doll, that had been religiously put away, was taken from her slumbers
and furbished for Bessie’s Christmas. “Why, really, it’s going to be a
Christmas, after all,” she said.
“Only it’s so queer to have it so warm,” grumbled Johnny. “Winter
without snowballing isn’t winter!”
“Oh, I don’t know,” said Nancy, beginning to defend the thing she had
adopted.
The man who had found the horns for her found also a little baby fox,
and that was kept in great seclusion to become, on Christmas morning, a
pet for Johnny; and Marnie and Nancy had great times together feeding
it. He had the funniest little bark already. “Oh, we are coming along!”
cried Nancy.
But there was more to be done. She remembered that once, when her
father had taken her to see the ruins of the old mission, she had
observed a number of Mexican “shacks,” or huts, near by. She saw the
dinner of one family, which consisted of half a sweet-potato and a
red pepper. But she had also seen a big cage full of canarios. And so
Nancy and Johnny set out to walk over to the mission, losing their way
several times, but finding it again all at once. There an Indian woman,
who was about thirty years old and looked a hundred, flung her baby,
which was the loveliest little harmony of brown and rose you ever saw,
into her husband’s arms, and, after a great deal of pantomime and dumb
show, sold, for the price of the last piece of silver in Nancy’s purse,
a pair of the canarios in a cage made of reeds, each one an exquisite
pinch of feathers, a lot of living gems, of all colors of the rainbow,
blue, and yellow, and green, and purple, and red, and brown--iridescent
little things, with a song like the faintest, prettiest echo of a Hartz
canary’s song. And there was Marnie’s Christmas present settled.
But for Robby? Oh, there was the horned toad she had heard about. Robby
had seen one in some show or other at home, and had longed for it. Here
it was to his hand,--if she could find it. And with the help of the man
who had helped her before, and who could not fancy what she wanted it
for, find it she did. Robby would be delighted.
If Nancy had been born in the region, or was living in any town there,
she would have found no difficulty in making Christmas presents like
those she had hitherto given; but these gifts that she found possible
were unique and unlike anything she could have obtained at her old home.
And now for sweetmeats. Well, they had dried some of the luscious
grapes and there were the raisins in the pantry, just oozing and
crusted with sugar; and there was the barrel of molasses from the
sugar-mill down on the Brazos; no one could make more delicate candy
than Nancy could and did; and there had been a great harvest of
pecan-nuts; and thus, so far as the stockings were concerned, Christmas
had no more to ask.
The expected day was close at hand, and Nancy pictured to herself how
it would all go off--how the stockings would be hung up, how Johnny
would help with the chair and then be in bed before his own gift
appeared, and how she would be up at the peep of dawn to go out and
bring in that baby fox--the delicate, delicious, dewy dawn--and make
his bed under Johnny’s stocking, tying his leash to the toe, after
fastening it securely to a hook in the chimney; and how she would
untwist and unbind and unlace a great bunch of the roses outside that
were having a late blossoming on their luxuriant growth, and bring it
into the window and train it all around the room under the ceiling. It
would be--well, as beautiful as the Christmas green; it couldn’t be
more beautiful, she said in her thoughts.
It was at this time that Mrs. Murtrie began to be a little anxious
about her husband. He should have returned from his hunting-trip some
days before, and he was still absent, no one could say where. And, of
course, she was conjuring up all sorts of frightful possibilities in
the way of accidents, and Marnie was helping her; and Nancy herself,
although ordinarily holding her father to be invulnerable, felt a
degree of alarm as she thought what if he had fallen into some gulch,
or lost his way, or drowned in one of the rivers that rose, after a
rain in the hills, so swiftly that, in a town below, a man had been
overtaken before he could get off the bridge. As for Johnny, he was
for going out to find his father, if he only knew which way to go. As
night fell, and it was Christmas eve, the house was full of a sort of
electric tension; no one said just what every one was thinking, till
suddenly Bessie broke out with a great sob, and cried: “I want my
papa!” Then every one fell to comforting her, and all were furtively
wiping away tears, when steps rang on the gallery, the door burst open,
and the father, with his blue eyes shining out of his browned skin, and
his great voice resonant, stood before them, holding an immense bird
with wide-spreading wings.
“It’s a wild turkey,” he said, after the uproarious greetings, and
as soon as they loosened their embraces. “I was resolved not to come
back without a turkey for Christmas. And it’s a great deal richer and
sweeter than any home-made bird, as you’ll see when it’s roasted.”
A turkey! And Nancy had but lately been bemoaning herself that the
dinner would be without a turkey. She had gone to bed, and so did not
see her mother seize the wings of the wild trophy, and trim them, and
run out to the kitchen to the adjacent building and dry them well in a
hot oven, and later trim them again, and bind them at the base with the
palms of an old kid glove and so finish for Nancy’s Christmas as fine a
feather fan as one could wish to wave on a hot summer afternoon.
But at last, when the house was quite still, Nancy crept out of her
room and summoned Johnny to help her with the chair. Johnny was too
sleepy not to be glad to be dismissed after that, and then she disposed
of the presents exactly as she had planned, and wondered what the
large parcel was, swinging by a string from her own stocking, and
went to sleep to the tune of the song a mocking-bird sang, sweet, and
strong, and joyous, in the pecan-tree outside, till a rising wind swept
it away. And if you could have looked into the living-room of that
bungalow next morning, you would have seen Johnny hugging his baby fox,
and Bessie hugging her doll and Marnie chirping to her birds, and their
mother putting spools, and needles, and scissors into her work-basket,
and the father taking his ease in his big chair with its shining
supports, and Nancy leisurely fanning herself, as if there were not a
norther blowing outside, which, had the casements been open, would have
blown the rain quite across the room. Rain? No, oh, no! For, see! look!
For a wonder, the loveliest, silveriest, soft snow was falling, which,
even if it melted to-morrow, made Nancy’s northern heart feel, in her
southern home, the spirit of Christmas everywhere.
[15] Reprinted from “St. Nicholas Magazine” with permission.