Dac Crossley's Western Blog

December. The Direst Month

I told my daughter – nothing ever happens in December. Projects aren’t completed, manuscripts aren’t reviewed, you can write off any professional accomplishments. Not in December. Not gonna happen.

Of course some people are born in December. Others die. Presidents get impeached. It’s just not a month for getting things done. Or a month for writers, either. Too many distractions. Maybe it’s the short days and long nights. My Neanderthal genes say “Hibernate. Let’s make fat.” Nothing I can do about that! We push back at the darkness with strings of lights. Downtown Athens, Georgia glitters among trees and lampposts. My neighborhood could be Disney World.

We listen to music of Christmas from the Middle Ages, thanks to a harpist at Hendershots. Irish strings serenade us at the Globe Bar. At my table sit scientists, writers, artists of many talents. We salute our missing Padre, our sculptor, others who have gone before. No politics or religion intrude on us, not on Sunday afternoons at the Globe.

Sing. Push back at the darkness. The shortest day of the year approaches. The worst of the autumn season is over. Winter, the nastiest of times, will be short. By the end of January I’ll find crocus blooms outside my door.

The cat sleeps in the window, absorbing the sun. Cats know, don’t they? I wish I did.

Dac Crossley
December 16, 2019. Bon voyage, Liz F.

“I am fond of pigs. Dogs look up to us. Cats look down on us. Pigs treat us as equals.” – Winston Churchill.

A Christmas Letter

Merry Christmas, Mom!

It’s your Sonny, writing to thank you for all those childhood Christmases back in Kingsville, Texas. Your joy still rings in my memory – all those Carols that you sang with such enthusiasm, little Walter and I following along. I remember your sudden tears at the beauty of some passages; today I weep along with you. A precious lesson: You taught me it was okay to cry at music, and I still do.

Do churches still hold little pageants? Mary and Joseph and an angel or two? And the Magi making their way down the aisles. I liked the Christmas hymns better when you sang them yourself. Our Presbyterian Church in Kingsville included Santa Claus – bet that doesn’t happen today.

Santa Claus wasn’t gonna come down out chimney – it was just a stove-pipe connected to that potbellied stove. I remember the sweet smell of mesquite burning there. Santa would have to come in the front door. And you locked that door! I was alarmed.

There wasn’t a conifer growing anyplace in Kingsville. Christmas trees showed up in a parking lot, remember? We all helped hang baubles once the lights were strung. Throwing icicles onto the tree evolved into an art, now long lost. I’d never seen a real icicle anyway.

Christmas morning, with all those presents for Walter and me. How did you do it, Depression’s hand heavy across the land? Then off to Grandfather Baird’s house. Not over the river and through the woods; we didn’t have those. Down the calieche road, that’s how we went, remember? The Bairds remembered the Plantation Christmas, gathered around the huge claw-foot table, your presents under the tablecloth at your seat. Grandfather Baird at the head of the table with a huge pile under the cloth – he’d augmented it with bricks.

And Christmas evening at Grandmother Crossley’s, whose traditions were more Presbyterian and western. Gifts of salted pecans. T-bone steaks for dinner. Her carefully-crafted tree, where you needed coordination between lights and ornaments, no color clashes, please. Then Lionel Barrymore on the radio, WOAI in San Antonio, reading “A Christmas Carol.”

Mom, thanks for teaching me a cheerful Christmas season. I know now that you worried about your parents who had no income, your brother Mitchell and his drinking, those dubious prospects during the Great Depression. Thanks for giving me and my brother a childhood of love, free from cares. A joyful Christmas.

Missing you,

Your Sonny.