CHRISTMAS MIRACLE IN THE TIME OF INFLUENZA

My mother was born on Christmas Day, 1918. When my sister was old enough to take charge of gift-buying for these coincidental occasions, her typically casual demeanor turned downright persnickety.

It seemed my sister's aim -- practically a crusade -- was to ensure my mother would never be shortchanged in gifts merely because of a happenstance of calendar.

When gifts were wrapped for my mother, pains were taken to identify the presents as birthday offerings or Christmas offerings, with my sister -- young but determined -- chastising anyone who failed to meet this standard. There would be no yuletide ambiguity on her watch.

I still find it touching my sister felt this sense of mission, just as I always regarded it as peculiar and special that my mother would celebrate a birthday on the one day of the year when everyone got gifts.

Photo albums document my family's tradition of finishing the Christmas feast with a candle-lit cake. Our voices joined not in carols but in the singular verse of "Happy Birthday." It was a custom that seemed uniquely ours.

The noble efforts of my sister notwithstanding, I doubt my mother ever felt gypped for not having been born on, say, Columbus Day. By all parties, my mother stood sufficiently appreciated, even worshipped. Never was I a rebel where she was concerned. Nothing about her, including her birthday, seemed to me less than remarkable.

People of my generation expend a lot of energy coming to grips with their upbringing, many believing they were oppressed by their parents or neglected entirely. As much as I'd like to attach a portion of my problems to bad lineage or a forbidding adolescent home life, none of them are directly traceable. In fact, I recall enjoying my parents' company, though certain I was often difficult and distant in my youth.

My mom was especially diverting. She knew a good joke when she heard it and recognized malarkey when it crossed her path. Putting one over on her was a challenge.

A registered nurse by trade, she held a job most of her adult life, though would probably laugh off any suggestion this constituted feminist heroism; my mother worked to help make a better life for her children, kissed up to no one and held certain expectations because she earned them. If patronized by some dull soul, she became feisty beyond belief.

In displaying easily a nurse's compassion, my mother also held a medical professional's detachment from the suffering she saw. In the years she did public health nursing, I traveled with her occasionally during summer vacation, attending with her home visits to residents in some of Missouri's poorest counties. In the face of this poverty that was an everyday part of her work, she never lost heart nor grew morose. She knew and accepted the limitations to which she could help.

Just as those home visits still shape my thinking, her life experiences toughened her for hardships she'd face. It has long been my contention -- and my mother's very being sustained this -- that our society grows softer with each passing generation. We know nothing now of growing up without power or indoor plumbing or vaccines; people my age have tantrums if the cable goes out.

When I was older, in college I believe, I took my mother on a country drive one springtime Sunday. We wandered to a place she wanted to stop, a rural cemetery in Mississippi County, not far from where she grew up as one of the 15 children of Robert and Susan McGill in a place called Dogwood.

We meandered among the grave markers of Armer Cemetery for a time, she with some purpose I supposed and me idly reading the names and dates. I discovered her intention before she needed to point it out to me. In a row were four resting places of siblings. In one 11-day stretch, from Nov. 3 to Nov. 14, three brothers and a sister died of influenza; the child of one of the brothers also died in those horrible weeks and was buried in an adjacent plot.

I stood speechless at what was revealed here, a grim family history spelled out on grave markers, funerals held days apart with all the same kin in attendance. I would learn later that my grandmother, who would die three years before my own birth, couldn't attend some of the funerals of her own children, fear for her health being the foremost concern.

Forty-one days after the last of the McGill influenza victims was buried, Susan McGill gave birth to her 14th child, my mother.

At that time, in those very grim circumstances, my mother came about as an affirmation of life, a Christmas miracle of sorts. Born of hearty stock, she carried her toughness through life just as she carried her grace.

She even beat cancer once. Sad to say, just once.

I've had aunts ask me at times if Christmas convenes in me a bit of melancholy because my mother is gone. I've always said no. I spent 25 Christmases with her, and one day I will have spent that many without her.

But I treasure her presence in my life still. And when I think of Christmas, and the joy that life brings and this season represents, I think of her.

Ken Newton is editor of the Southeast Missourian.