I'll Be Home for Christmas

There’s nothing like the Christmas season in a small town. It’s a large part of what makes me nostalgic for the Bedford of my youth. The sights, the sounds, the feelings all combine to make the season special and hard to duplicate.

My extended family lived many hours away from Bedford, so we spent very few Christmas mornings in town. But aside from Christmas Eve and Christmas day, we were rarely out of town for the month of December.

With Hallmark stores displaying the holiday ornaments as early as June and advertisements pushing their holiday sales in September and October, it may seem that Christmas preparation takes up half of the year prior to that special late December day. But, for me, the season always began right after Thanksgiving.

The people I’ve met from all over find it odd that we would have the Monday after Thanksgiving off from school. I’d explain that it’s just one of those holidays primarily celebrated in rural areas. As a non-hunter, I appreciated the hunters who forced our school district to make the “First Day of Buck” and the “First Day of Doe” seasons into official holidays. Having two four-day week leading up to Christmas vacation was never something that I took for granted.

Even if it weren’t for the day off from school, you always knew Christmas was on its way when the lights were illuminated on Evitts Mountain. Our house sat near the base of the mountain and faced uphill. Walking out our front door any December evening, we could clearly see Santa and his reindeer or the word “NOEL” lit up in brilliant incandescent light.

Arriving downtown on Richard or Juliana Streets, we were greeted by with more lighted figures hanging from the light posts. Bells and snowflakes provided a festiveness with or without snow falling or people walking along the sidewalks.

As the years pass, it always seems that snow was falling “back in my day.” Salt ground into the streets and snow pushed into mounds provided the white aura to the whole town. Our “white Christmas” was always there; at least it is in memories. There were those oddly warm Christmases with us playing outside in shorts, but those times seem obscured by the big fluffy flakes landing on the tongues of tightly bundled children shuffling along the streets in their winter boots.

It was on those sidewalks along Juliana and Pitt Streets that the real feeling of Christmas emerged. Women wrapped in long coats with knitted scarves and hats ducking in and out of stores as they shopped for just the right presents always gave friendly greetings as they pass. Men dutifully cleared the driveways and sidewalks so that Chip Engle and Lola Felton and Dave Koury could offer their wares. Bill England and Dick Letrent were waiting at the pharmacist’s counter for those of us who didn’t handle the cold weather as well as most. And the snow continued to fall.

My earliest memory of solo Christmas shopping has me scouring the selection at Murphy’s for just the right record to fit my friends’ tastes. With a school child’s meager budget, I was forced into the “cut-out” bin where leftover records were on sale for two or three dollars each. As proud as I was of the effort that went into those choices, the end result was a more thoughtful gift than I provide as an adult today, even if they don’t remember what the gift was.

Today, going to the mall or shopping online misses most of the fun. We run into far few people we know at the mall and when was the last time you saw someone you knew at Amazon.com? Never one to appreciate getting clothes for Christmas, I’d take an entire holiday of shirts and pants to experience Christmas shopping in downtown Bedford again. And to see the lights on Evitts Mountain again would be worth trading all of my toys for another pair of boring khakis.