Christmas Eve with my father’s people in Omaha, during my boyhood, was invariably stiff and unfestive, whereas we always spent a jolly Christmas Day at the O’Kelly farm. Not that the Edwardses were unkind or inhospitable. It’s only that the O’Kellys, by nature, were more spontaneous and high-spirited. The minute we entered the farmhouse, we heard stories so uproarious they must have been invented, though they usually began or ended with the phrase “Swear to God.” The laughter and tall tales continued through dinner and into the evening as more aunts and uncles and cousins came pouring through the house to greet us. Any given Christmas, we probably saw thirty-five O’Kellys.
A Christmas Eve conversation, on the other hand, followed a serious, predictable line, beginning with the unreliability of the weather and leading on through the deteriorating condition of their ailing friends and neighbors and automobiles. As a boy, I considered this talk painfully dull, but over the years I learned to take a certain pleasure in the constancy of it—the way you will sometimes come to appreciate the cheerless old hymn in church simply because it’s so familiar. I suppose, as we age, any sign of permanence consoles us, no matter if it bores us besides.
Christmas on the Great Plains, edited by Dorothy Dodge Robbins and Kenneth Robbins
Art by Claudia McGehee
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