FOR MOST OF THE CENTURY: EARLY CHRISTMASES

Jean Bell Mosley's new autobiography, "For Most of the Century," is only available in serialized form in the Southeast Missourian. Return each week for her continuing story.

Our early Christmases were very simple but the best. Childhood wonderment, expectancy and fulfillment made them so.

There were no parties. No one went caroling or a wassailing. Homes were too far apart. Except for the school and church programs, Christmas was largely a family affair. But with seven of us -- eight for a very short while when S.W. was with us -- that was just the right size.

We had things at Christmas we didn't have the rest of the year --divinity, molasses candy, oranges and popcorn balls. There was the smell of the cedar tree too. We could smell cedar any time we wanted to with two such trees in our front yard and hundreds of them in the surrounding woods. But to bring a cut cedar tree into the warmth of the fireplace-heated parlor, or even kitchen, was to smell cedar.

Mama and Grandma had brought with them to the farm some tinseled tree ornaments, mostly green glass pine cones and some tinsel-edged, holly-printed, basket-like cones with hanging loops so that they could be hung on the tree branches. I don't remember them ever holding anything as they were designed to do, but they made the tree sparkle. Lou, Lillian and I made the paper chains and always there were garlands of popcorn. We raised popcorn.

We had some glass wind chimes which were never hung outside to blow in the wind. They were small, different sized pieces of hand-painted glass suspended by varying lengths of string from a red hoop with a centralized hanger so the strings would hang straight. Did someone make them? Mama? Grandma? Some aunt? Brought from Virginia? They were the cherished ornament, above 11 others, of our tree trimmings. It was a joy to brush by the tree every chance one had to set off the enchanting, tinkling, fairy-like music. The whole tree seemed to shiver with gladness.

In the early years it was Santa Claus who brought the presents, but later, one gift to each one was the custom. From me, Grandpa and Dad might receive little cloth bags of tobacco with yellow draw string closings, for Grandma a new dust cap, a package of needles for Mama and handkerchiefs for Lillian and Lou.

The earliest gift I remember was a pair of red felt, bead-trimmed Indian moccasins. Then there was the monkey-on-a-string. By some pulling on the string at the bottom, the metal monkey actually climbed the string. When Dad wound up a metal ladybug and it started crawling across the floor toward me, I frantically climbed to the top of Grandpa's head by way of watch fob, shirt pocket, moustache and ears.

The year I received a can of violet-scented talcum powder was memorable. Sweet violet has been my favorite scent since then and so hard to find.

One year Lou and I decided to have our very own Christmas in the attic. The attic has been described earlier -- exposed interior log walls, fireplace chimney coming up through to keep it fairly warm, casement window with missing pane so that Tabby Cat could come in when sleet and snow swirled outside.

Lou and I often used the same route of entrance into the attic as did Tabby Cat. We, of course, had another entrance by way of stairs and doors, but it was much more challenging and secretive to hop up onto the outside wash bench, throw one leg up over the nearby lean-to pantry roof, scramble on, crawl up the slanting shingles to the pane-missing window, reach inside to unlatch it and, with enormous effort, pull our bodies up and over the sill.

That winter we had a secret tree of our own in the attic. At least we thought it secret. If others knew about it, they never let on.

Trudging through the surrounding snowy woods, hatchet in hand, we selected a small cedar we judged we could manipulate from the wash bench to the pantry roof and through the casement window.

We trimmed our tree with crayon colored paper chains. From ads and greetings in the pre-Christmas weekly newspaper we cut out a suitable number of figures for the nativity scene (This was after Mama gave us the book of Bible stories), pasted them on cardboard and tried to make them stand up.

The manger was the exciting thing that particular Christmas. It was a doll bed Dad had, some years ago, made for us. It was enormously out of proportion to our paper people and animals. Dad had attached four slat legs to the corners of a wooden box. Painted red, it was a treasured possession.

It was easy to bring straw from the straw stack through the casement window to make the "manger" look like the one pictured in our book of Bible stories.

"I wish we had something live," Lou would say nearly every day after we had attended the school Christmas program at which one of the school "shepherds" had surprisingly brought a real live lamb for the nativity tableau.

"Well, we sure can't get old Star (our big red cow) up here nor Ned, Raleigh, nor Russell (some of our horses)."

We continued to sort through our few dolls to decide which one to put into the manger.

"None of them even looks like a baby," Lou complained.

"Nor alive," I added.

On the last Friday before Christmas, it was near dark, snowing and sleeting when we got home from school. Without going through the downstairs first, we climbed up the pantry roof way to place three paper Wise Men and camel we'd made at school. It was late and with no lights in the attic we could hardly see anything.

From the direction of the crib, there came a faint "meow." We bent over the straw-lined crib and there was Tabby Cat with four new-born kittens. Soft and warm, all curled up together. Five things, alive!

After a while I asked Lou, "What'll we do?" feeling, vaguely, that something wasn't quite right here, but not exactly wrong either.

After another long while, Lou said, "Nothing. Something alive and warm is better than a cold doll."

And that's the way it was that Christmas.*

* A portion of this condensed for the Southeast Missourian, Dec. 24, 1995

~Jean Bell Mosley is an author and longtime resident of Cape Girardeau.