RIVER CITY JOURNAL: MEMORIES STIR UP HOLIDAYS

Triumph. Fear. Joy. Agony. Death. Birth. Love. Hardship. These stand above the mundane topics generated by family get-togethers when your elders reminisce about the there-and-then in hopes that those in the here-and-now will find connections and meaning in their roots.

Your roots are firmly planted in the Ozarks hills where they have been tended and nurtured by seven or so generations of hardy hillbillies who laughed and lived, cried and died on the rocky hills and sought to grow crops in narrow valleys best suited for briars and buckbrush.

This is no lament. Just plain facts. It is the way of hill folks to present the past without varnish. Passing years soften some of the memories, sharpen others. Whenever your family is together, you can expect another peek at the past as languid conversation, without warning, becomes a hot poker of revelation. New facts erupt, or old ones are amplified. This is the oral history of those you love.

An early Christmas dinner last weekend at your mother's house once again brought you closer to Brushy Creek, the hill-bound valley where your mother's family has lived and been buried since the early part of the last century. For your mother, Christmas is a difficult time. Sixty-nine years ago her father was killed a few days before the holiday in a hunting accident. It is the sort of event that colors a celebration forever.

After dinner, sitting around the table too full to move very far or very quickly, your mother begins recollecting people and events of her childhood. Like the mysterious McCue sisters who were rarely seen in public and wore dresses all the way down to the floor even in the 1930s and were Irish Catholics in a Scotch-Irish bastion. Or like the kind Mr. Hittle, a German immigrant (also Catholic) who was devoted to his adopted son until both were forced to move away at the outbreak of World War II because their name and ancestry were too much like a certain German dictator. Life can be cruel in the hills.

Then your mother begins talking about her own mother, a woman who was widowed with five children and seven month's pregnant with the sixth, who sternly imparted practical values and the lessons of life. Her mother "preached day and night" to five daughters about the dangers of getting pregnant before marriage and told them convincingly they would be on their own if ever such a calamity befell them. Yes, young readers, there was a time when unwed motherhood wasn't accepted, even in the farthest backwoods.

Yet when a 21-year-old unwed neighbor became pregnant, your mother recalls, her mother sat at the old Minnesota sewing machine on the front porch making baby clothes for the unfortunate woman's child-to-be. The baby was stillborn, and your grandmother, the one who talked of hellfire and brimstone regarding motherhood outside marriage, prepared the tiny body for burial, dressing it in the newly made garments over which she had labored.

The dinner table is quiet now. It is the first time this story has been told in your memory. How fitting it seems at the time of year when the biggest story is about another unwed mother who gave birth in a stable.

Your grandmother, you would like to think, would have done the neighborly thing, if she had been in Bethlehem instead of Brushy Creek: She would have sewn a few swaddling things. And had a straightforward talk with Joseph about getting a marriage license.

~R. Joe Sullivan is the editor of the Southeast Missourian.