Home for Christmas

Home for Christmas Alt by Nickell Ceraldi This year, Fm going home to the mountains for Christmas. My first frandchild has been born and I'm going ome to hold that little boy in my arms for the first time. I've been gone from those mountains-except for summer visits -for 38 years, ever since I left for college at eighteen. I married and reared my family elsewhere, but I have never called "home" any other place but that clapboard farmhouse built on land that has been in my family since 1760. In recent years my brother, who inherited the place, sold it to me, and we gave it to our daughter. She and her husband are teachers, and now, thanks be to God, they are new parents. I'm going home for Christmas to cradle that little boy on my shoulder and rock him in the chair I rocked his mother in. He will be warm and clean and wrapped in soft blankets. I know all little boys are not so lucky; the boy whose birthday we celebrate on Christmas Day, for example, was cold and laid in a manager. It will take me about four hours to drive up there from the city. The road will rise steadily through the foothills and then the four-lane highway will assault the mountains. The hills nave been leveled, the gullies filled up, tunnels blasted through those ranges too high to cross. Some of the peaks have been wrapped in a ribbon of asphalt and I rise on one of them gradually and gracefully on soft velvet cushions and stereophonic sound. At a certain place, where Indian Creek flows into the broad New River, I will turn onto a narrow, two-lane, hard surfaced road which will wind its tortuous way for fifteen miles up a canyon then burst suddenly into a wide rolling valley some fifty miles across and walled on both sides by distant high mountains. Seven miles into this broad valley I will round a certain curve and there, at the foot of the hill, is home. I used to round that curve when I was a child walking home from a two-room schoolhouse, hurrying to get there in time to listen to "The Lone Ranger" on the radio. I remember Christmases in that old house, too. 26 To tell the truth Christmas was the only holiday we celebrated in a traditional way. The 4th of July was spent cutting wheat, around Thanksgiving time the hogs were butchered, and Easter came on Sunday anyway. But Christmas was planned for and set aside. My mother and older sister started in November with the fruitcakes. They had to be covered tightly and cured with apple quarters until the apples were shriveled and dry and the fruitcakes shiny and moist and plump. Our Christmas tree always came from the field across the road.. A cedar was dragged home behind the black mare, shaggy in her thick winter coat. Eggs from our chickens, milk from our cows, and storebought sugar and chocolate were combined , according to directions written in an old green cookbook, to make enough candy to keep every dish in the house filled for two weeks. Then came Christmas Day. First, we would dash downstairs through the cold house pulling our parents after us. Dad would stoke up the stove while we shouted and danced and examined what Santa Claus had left. After the presents, Mom marshalled the whole family in preparation for the expected Christmas dinner guests. Some straightened the house, others built a fire in the living room stove, and anybody left over would report to the kitchen and help finish preparing the Christmas dinner. Now there was a feast! And the main attraction was a specially cured ham that had been saved from hog butchering the year before. It had been soaked, then boiled and skinned, and finally roasted; the aroma from the oven could make you dizzy with anticipation. The table was covered with dishes of food. It was like an altar of thanksgiving, offering some of everything that had been canned, or cured, or dried since the last spring. By noon, all the...