My Father’s Christmas Gift

One of my precious possessions is a picture. I am guessing that it cost about 29 cents at the time it was purchased. My father bought it as a gift for me for my first Christmas when I was six months old.

The great Depression was at its depths. Not only was it courageous to have another baby in the face of hard times, but there were other things as well. For I came into a Depression within my own family – I was filling a poignant space left by my older sister, Mary Phyllis, who had recently died.

The circumstances of her death were especially tragic. She was almost two, a plump dimpled baby, adored by all around her, including her big brother, Jack, who was five when she was born. She was a merry sweet child, with the eager angelic aura often present in a child who will not be long on earth.

My father had dug a hole in the front yard to plant an acacia tree. The ground had proved to be hardened clay below the top soil and they had put water in to soak and soften it up. The clay held the liquid like a vessel as it slowly absorbed into the earth.

Mary Phyllis often played in the back yard, secured by a picket fence gate at each side, chasing dapples of sunshine, her sweet face bathed in the gentle coastal breezes, for we lived by the ocean, and her chubby finger exploring flowers, delighting in the smells and tastes of the petals. She especially loved nasturtiums.

(Mary Phyllis in her pink dress and bonnet)

How the gate at the side yard became unlatched will forever be the mystery. My mother’s brother, a sweet and tragic man, a hopeless alcoholic, lived with them at the time, and later wrote that he thought he might have been responsible. The baby girl pushed though the unlatched gate and toddled to the hole. She fell in and drowned.

With breath taking courage, and mature wisdom, from all I could later gather, both my mother and father refused to fix blame and lay guilt on one another or anyone else. Mary Phyllis was an angel child, she had blessed them and they would live in gratitude for the gift of her brief life.

I was conceived at Michaelmas, four months after her death. My mother later told me now her Aunt Nene helped her work through her recurring fears that I, too, would die as a little child. It is interesting that part of my life work would be helping families at the threshold of death. Surely it was a compensation for my brave parents then, when I came to fill their arms again.

So it was that my father bought me a picture for my first Christmas. It is the gentlest possible scene. A kindly mother, sitting by an open window pauses in her mending to enjoy watching her two young children. The older one, about three, is playing with the baby in the cradle who is reaching for a sun lit toy. Sunlight shines into the simple darkened room, lighting a bowl of fresh flowers and haloing the children hair. The picture seemed prophetic of my destiny to be the mother of a large family and to professionally dedicate my work to the needs of young children.

I can imagine my slender, intense, and handsome father walking down the aisles of the 5 and 10 cent store where he must have bought the gift, Woolworths, or maybe the Kress store. He didn’t buy socks, or something practical with the few dollars he might have felt he could spare for his children’s Christmas, but a piece of art. No doubt tender, nostalgic memories of his own mother, who had died when he was thirteen, drew him to it, too. So I picture him spotting it on a wall, or going through a stack, and the pleased smile and warm light in his blue eyes as he selected it and paid the clerk. I believe at the same time he bought a little book of poetry for my brother.

Though my father had gone to officers school in the first world war, and graduated as a teacher in vocational training, he had only a few months of schooling in his four high school years. The demanding seasonal schedule on his family’s Michigan farm left little time for the cultivation of the fine arts. His parents had only basic elementary education.

Yet both Dad and our mother, Lola, from a similar rural background, were always striving to broaden our lives, to widen the souls cape of our experiences with opportunities they hadn’t had. They wanted us to be surrounded with good music and to learn to play instruments ourselves. “Every young person should play a musical instrument!” our father would often declare. We always had a piano and they made our lessons a priority. They bought me an accordion when I was ten and it served to entertain for over sixty years!

Above all, they made sure our home provided every opportunity for creativity and inventiveness. We had dress ups, puppets, books, quality art materials, tools, abundant raw material for projects and wonderful times with animals and nature. They surrounded us with a zestful, ‘can do’ creative enthusiasm for meeting life that inspired all three of us, my inventive engineer brother, my sister with a fine arts masters who created museum exhibits, and my work as a teacher and artist.

I think Christmas, 1931, while no doubt meager, was a happy one for my parents. A few years before, my father had bought some beautiful mountain acreage where I would learn to walk and where they built a mountain cabin and retreat enjoyed by family and friends for over fifty years. At the same time, he acquired a 1926 Dodge truck that would become a famous icon for the whole family and would be used for the eighty years following! My father’s job was secure amidst widespread and frightening unemployment, for he taught wood working and mechanics, needed skills for the time. They had their rambunctious, live wire eight-year-old son, Jack, and, once more, they had a baby girl under the Christmas tree.

As I look at my father’s strong, legible, forward inscribed signature on the back of that simple picture that he gave me, “From Dad to Nancy, Christmas 1931” I am warmed again with hislove, his enduring faith in me, his pride in my accomplishments and unwavering support for my development at every level and I am filled with gratitude for this wonderful father whose commitment to his children was so vital to everything that we would be able to become and to give to this life.

Nancy Jewel Poer, September, Michaelmas, 2008