Spending this Christmas in the happily ever ... before
They spent their first Christmas together in a drafty third-floor walk-up on High Street in the town of Mount Holly, N.J., north of Camden and across the Delaware River from Philadelphia.
Money was short. There was no opportunity to visit relatives, or for relatives to visit them. They made a pact to spend no more than $20 on each other for gifts, which left them with enough cash to purchase a live tree from a Boy Scouts troop in town.
There was no money for lights or ornaments.
They made bowl after bowl of popcorn and stitched the kernels together with needle and thread, and used it for garland.
They had an old pad of colored construction paper, and fashioned homemade ornaments using scissors and a pot of glue paste borrowed from the small newspaper where he worked. Stars, snowflakes and Christmas trees, mostly, along with a few hearts and the first letters of their names: “A” and “E”.
Only one of the ornaments has survived the decades since then, a Christmas tree, the paper having long since faded to gray, like the hair on the young man who made it, like the memories of that long ago Christmas.
He remembers it was terribly cold, but they still went out for a walk, marveling at the empty streets and the dense, weighty quiet.
She got him a book, though he no longer remembers the title. He got her a stuffed animal, a Dachshund, to remind her of the real one she’d had as a girl. What else did they do?
The Vincentown Diner, a favorite of theirs, was only a few miles away.
Did they splurge and go there for dinner?
The details have faded from him. They faded from her, too, even more so.
Still, for years afterward she called it her best Christmas.
They were together. The rest did not matter … does not matter.
He still works for a newspaper, though far from the East Coast.
He has been reliving that far-off Christmas because he received a note from a reader this week that ended with a question he feels compelled to answer.
The man wrote, “I know from what you’ve written in the past that this is the first Christmas after your wife passed away. I’m in the same boat. My family is trying to make me feel better. Yours too I bet. The other day my daughter was asking me how I’m doing and I told her, honestly, I don’t foresee a happily ever after, like there is in fairy tales. My granddaughter was in the next room and overheard us, and she said to me, “What about a happily ever before?” I laughed and told her, hell, I’d go along with that. How about you?” Yes.
Absolutely.