JOY ALONG THE WAY: CHRISTMAS IN THE ATTIC

Lou and I had just come home from the school Christmas program and were still excited about the real live lamb one of the school "shepherds" had brought for the nativity tableau. This was new.

"I wish we had something live for "our" Christmas tree," Lou said.

By "our" Christmas tree she did not mean the sparkling family tree standing in the parlor.

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

The attic was our second home within our home. A fireplace chimney, coming up from below, kept it fairly warm in winter despite the fact that a casement window had a small pane missing. This pane was allowed to remain missing because Tabby Cat used that entrance to come into the warmth when sleet and snow swirled outside.

Tabby Cat used the same route of entrance into the attic as did Lou and I. 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, 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 and have a second Christmas all our own.

We trimmed our little tree with crayon-colored paper chains. From ads and greetings in the pre-Christmas weekly newspapers we cut out a suitable number of figures for the nativity scene, 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 made for us some years ago. It was enormously out of proportion to our paper people and animals. Dad had attached four slat legs to the sides 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 those we'd seen on Christmas cards.

A week before Christmas we were still trying to choose what doll to put into the manger to represent the Baby Jesus. When we got home from school, Lou and I would hasten up, via the pantry roof, to see "our" Christmas tree. "I still wish we had something live," Lou would say nearly every day, remembering the live lamb at the Christmas program.

"Well, we sure can't get ol' Star (our big red cow) up here nor Ned, Raleigh nor Russell (our horses)." We were still sorting through our few dolls to decide which one to put into the manger.

"None of them even looked 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. Without going through the downstairs first, we climbed up the pantry roof way. We could hardly see anything it was so late and there were no lights in the attic .

From the crib, there came a faint "Meow." We bent over it and there was Tabby cat with four new-born kittens. Soft and warm, all curled up together. Five things, live!

After a while I asked Lou, "What'll we do?"

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

And that's the way it was that Christmas.

REJOICE!

Jean Bell Mosley is an author and longtime columnist for the Southeast Missourian.