LITTLE ROCK — Editor’s note: We hope you, our faithful readers, have enjoyed the past few weeks’ offerings of some of our columnists’ favorite columns while John Brummett took the last few Tuesdays off. His regular column will return January 1, but till then, enjoy this Christmas column, originally published Dec. 25, 2011.
The magic of Christmas morning occurs most powerfully in the mind and imagination of the young and innocent child.
It lives on in the warm and vivid memories of the jaded adult.
On this morning, the jaded adult can be young again. He even can be innocent again.
He can be holding his hands over the wood stove in his granddaddy’s backwoods shack in Howard County.He is choosing to wonder, not too long or seriously, why Santa’s giftcard signature so closely resembles his granny’s handwriting.
He can be prone on the cold hardwood floorof a mostly darkened living room of his flat-topped little house at the end of a graveled lane in southwest Little Rock.
Lying on his stomach with his head propped by his hands, he is mesmerized by a certain sight and sound.
It is of an aluminum Christmas tree, framed by the picture window and transformed to blue and red and pink by the comforting and creaking rotation of a color wheel.
Perhaps you are aghast at this tinfoiled abomination, this lowbrow tackiness. But he is awed by the wonder.
He has the advantage of actually being there, alone, hour upon hour, over the Christmas seasons of the late 1950s and early 1960s.
And he is there again now, on Christmas morning a half-century later.
You aren’t there with him on that other occasion, either. You do not sit at the foot of his bed on a cold Christmas morning in 1959 and watch him pretend to sleep, deep under the covers.
That is Santa Claus, of course.
The big jolly man has just eaten the slice of cake in the kitchen and painstakingly erected that tent in the middle of the living room.
He needs to get to other kids’ houses and is sorry if he will run a little late. But he wants to pay special respects.
On this particular bed and on this particular Christmas morning,he plopped down his big red-clad behind just for a couple of silent loving minutes and a special connection.
This youngster is having a tough time of it in first grade, missing allthose days, getting his tonsils taken out.
And this tyke knows he would ruin the moment if he dared to open his eyes actually to see.
He understands, even as a child, that the magic comes from behind closed eyes. He cannot be sure even now whether this magic specifically came from his sleepy dreams or his waking imagination.
What he has come to understand, though, is that those are pretty much the same place.
And so, on this Christmas Day, his wish is that all of us will be young and innocent, if but for a time.
And it is that we will experience the magic, whether in our new imaginings or our long-held memories.
John Brummett’s column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his blog at brummett.arkansasonline.com.
Editorial, Pages 17 on 12/25/2012