Friends in Low Places

 What a wonderful Christmas Eve gathering at First United Methodist Church. We got there right at seven and the only seats we could find were way down front. 

Absolutely beautiful music from the choir, an outstanding and inspiring sermon about "friends in low places" from the pastor, Dr. Valerie Loner, and what fun to sing those carols with a large sanctuary full of people as I sat with my Sheila, Lillian, Jordan, and Margot -- who added her soft comments, gurgles, and smiles.

Afterwards we got the stroller from the car and spent a while walking Broad Street on this amazingly warm Christmas Eve. Then, WOW! -- The City Creamery was open!!! So we four grownups all got an ice cream! 

Then we ran into two of the three Williams boys who grew up with Lillian.

Now the baby sleeps, Jordan is stretched out on the couch reading, and I am in my easy chair tapping out these words while Sheila and Lillian torture us with the mouth-watering smells of their busyness in the kitchen, preparing for our Christmas breakfast.

I am actually a very happy, if sentimental, old geezer, but I often find my eyes clouded with tears of gratitude, and a bit of guilt, that I have lived 78 years -- already 11 years longer than Daddy, or Daddy Shaw, and even 7 years longer than Papa Baird.

I am glad I didn't miss this night - the music, the sermon, the candles -- even the one that wouldn't stay lit --- the baby's smiles, the ice cream, the walk, the delicious smells, with these loved ones.

Happy Holidays!

 -- In Progress --

My Daddy felt a call to Christian ministry soon after he got home from two years on tropical islands in the Pacific risking his life for our country against the Japanese while his brothers-in-law were slogging trough snowy woods in Belgium and France and finally Germany to defeat the Germans. 

When he came home -- I was born the year after he got home -- he began preaching at small churches near his home in Rockdale County Georgia.  By 1950 he ratified his new commitment by selling the little house he owned with his young wife and then with their three daughters and me -- a three year old towheaded strong-willed toddler -- and driving a long black Chevy up the winding roads over the southern Appalachians into the bluegrass of central Kentucky to little Asbury College to begin training to become a Methodist minister.

We were an evangelical family, living in what they called the GI barracks on the campus of an evangelical school as Daddy began his studies and the family grew again with my little sister Debi’s birth in 1951. I say all that to emphasize that for us Christmas was much more than Santa and special desserts and tinsel and such. We kids could just about recite the Matthew and Luke accounts of the Christmas story by heart and loved the sacred carols.

But we also enjoyed all the celebratory and secular aspects of the season too. 

For as long as I can remember Christmas was the very pinnacle of the year to me. It was even more exciting than my birthdays or the silliness of Trick-or-treating at Halloween or hunting Easter Eggs in spring.

 

Besides the wonders in our own house of finding, at the crack of dawn, what Santa Claus had left during the night, my earliest Christmas memories center on my Mama Shaw’s little milltown house in Milstead Georgia. Besides Daddy Shaw and Mama Shaw, my daddy’s rascally four brothers were there, eventually with their children and wives. The house was, to us kids anyway, gaudily and delightfully decorated with lots of lights... 

I am my grandmother's grandson; this is our house last night.

...and garlands and electrified candles in every window and three-foot-high plastic candles, carolers and Holy Family on the front porch.

These carolers used to stand on my grandmother's front porch in my childhood. If you drive by our house tonight you'll see them on our front porch.

 

That little Callaway Mills house  was crowded and noisy...

An example of the crowding of a large family in a small mill village home. L-R: Me, Mama Shaw, Debi, Carol, Aunt Margaret, Uncle James, Jan, Jack, Uncle Grady, Joan, Daddy.

 ...and filled with delicious smells of Mama Shaw’s turkey & dressing and cakes and pies...

Mama Shaw with part of a holiday feast.

 

...mixed with the smoke from several Lucky Strike and Camel cigarettes dangling from the gleeful faces of my uncles and grandfather. Daddy had given up his cigarettes “cold turkey” in the forties when he committed to the ministry. He had thrown the last few packs he owned into a furnace at the mill. There was Christmas music on the phonograph. There was a long prayer. And there was feasting. Some of those years there was an aluminum tree draped with multicolored tinsel and lights and “icicles”

Christmas 1958 at Mam Shaw's house. L-R: Baby David (born that May) Carol, Me (holding Hercules our new puppy), Beth, Debi.

Mama Shaw

1988 Mama Shaw with Brannon

1988 Mama Shaw with Lillian

 I loved Christmas at Mama Shaw’s! 

Mama Shaw's house (no longer in the family) as it appears on Google street view maps.

During the fifties and sixties my little sisters and I enjoyed hunting the perfect cedar tree as our Christmas tree. I suppose Daddy got permission from land owners among his parishioners for these annual wrks. I seems that somehow cedar trees grow another foot at least after they are cut and have to be trimmed further to fit the room. 

I eventually began to have my doubts about Santa Claus, and one year in the late fifties I was allowed to help be “Santa” for my younger siblings wich now included my another little sister Beth and our baby brother David. I had mixed feelings about that. I hated to lose Santa for myself, but I felt very grown-up to be a part of that preparation. 

My mother always bought small bottles of Welch’s grape juice  for the stockings which we also stuffed with Brazil nuts and pecans and oranges and apples and usually one small nicer gift. We arranged the larger gifts in chairs around the living room-- one for each family member. For breakfast there were always Mother’s yeast cinnamon rolls. Oh! I can smell them now. 

There was the year of the three speed Huffy bicycle. The year of the Elkhart trombone. 

When we moved to Rome and Daddy became pastor at Trinity United Methodist Church we were introduced to something new to us, the live Nativity Scene. It would be an important part of my Christmas for over sixty years. 

As grown-ups we continued or revived some of those traditions.

For a decade or more Brannon and Lillian and I would hunt Mike Burton's farm for our cedar Christmas tree just as I did with my father. Cedar trees are messy and their branches are not great for hanging ornaments, but "Tradition!" -- and also, they just smell like Christmas. 

Long after Daddy Shaw was gone, Sheila and I sometimes made it down to Milstead right after Thanksgiving to help Uncle James get all the boxes of Christmas down from the rafters of Mama Shaw's little garage and then, under constant and exacting instruction from Mama Shaw, recreated the tableau very much as I remembered it from childhood.

And Sheila and I stood in that same nativity scene there on Turner McCall Boulevard now watching our little daughters twist and scratch and wiggle as little angels sometimes pulling their tinsel halos all the way over their heads. We stood in that Nativity on the coldest Christmas Eve in Rome’s history standing on bricks heated in the church’s big fellowship hall oven and in just fifteen minute shifts to keep from freezing solid!

In no time, it seems, we were watching grown daughters and then a granddaughter in the nativity.

Then came the real shocker when our youngest, in 2022, fell in love with a wonderful young man who is Jewish. He was not used to celebrating Christmas!  But that Christmas Jordan came to stay with us for Christmas Eve and Christmas Day -- and we had a wonderful time. 

Lillian and Jordan stood, reverently, in the Nativity Scene on Christmas Eve as Joseph and Mary. I have pictures. 

Jordan as Joseph and Lillian as Mary in the 2022 live Nativity
scene at Trinity United Methodist Church. 

And when we got home that evening we celebrated the final day of Hanukkuh together as Jordan taught us the chants and the traditions of his faith.

Jordan and Lillian celebrating the last day of Hanukkah on December 24, 2022.

So all that to say, we have come to respect and enjoy Jewish traditions and ceremonies and are thrilled that our beautiful little granddaughter Margot will celebrate her first Christmas next week at our house with her parents -- after watching her parents burn the candles and listening to them sing the chants of the eight days of Hanukkah that ends this coming Sunday.

We love our son-in-law. We love our beautiful youngest granddaughter who has a Jewish heritage as long as her Christian heritage. We are very happy to be a mixed faith family these days.

Happy Hanukkah, Merry Christmas, and Happy New Year to all of our friends!

The menorah on our den mantel this week.

Our church presented the three wooden crosses to commemorate the births of our first three granddaughters and we have used those crosses as ornaments on our Christmas tree each year since. The church has since disbanded. A few weeks ago I found, online, the handmade wooden "Star of David" with an enclosed cross. I bought it and I plan to add Margot's name to it to join the crosses for her cousins on our tree,

I am a progressive

Almost a decade ago I got a message from an admired relative who very politely and honestly wanted a better understanding of how I disagree with many of our shared loved ones. When I ran across the old exchange yesterday I decided to update it as a post on my blog -- leaving out the references to specific beloved relatives.

————

In a nutshell I am a progressive. 

I like to think I am progressive in the tradition of Lincoln, TR, FDR, Truman, Ike, JFK, LBJ, Carter, Clinton, Obama, and Biden. I believe that the Preamble is the best one-sentence statement of my ideals for what government should be about. I believe the ideal is a balance of individual liberty and the common welfare. I believe that maximum liberty exists somewhere in the middle of the socialist/capitalist spectrum. Too far to the socialist end and we lose a vibrant, innovative economy and stifle liberty of imagination and entrepreneurship. Too far on the capitalist end and we are subject to the tyranny of the barons of big business. I believe a highly progressive system is the fairest form of taxation. Since 1981 I believe we have been moving too far toward the oligarchic extreme.

The middle class grew and flourished during the period of strong unions and highly progressive tax rates in the middle of the 1900s. That was when, in my opinion, we came closest -- imperfectly even then -- to the goal of "all boats rising". For a couple of decades it was entirely normal for the family of a factory worker or store clerk or office employee to own their own home and live a middle class lifestyle, often on one salary, and to expect their children to do as well or better.

In short, I suspect the progressive movement (TR, Taft, Wilson, FDR and the unions) saved America from the extremes of socialism and even communism and allowed for the flourishing of American business AND Americans in general during the twentieth century. Great improvements were made to infrastructure and government programs that benefitted everyone. Think of the Interstate Highway System or the Tennessee Valley projects or the GI Bill or (going back further) the Erie Canal, or the postal service, (to name a few) that benefitted industry and business and just ordinary citizens greatly while providing good work for millions.

The Reagan revolution of 1981 crippled unions and lowered progressive tax rates benefiting the wealthy at the expense of the middle classes. Those policies produced, in my opinion, the extreme concentration of wealth that has now reached Gilded Age levels, causing the Middle Classes to stagnate at best. It reaffirmed the error of the “trickle-down” theory of economics.

I am NOT anti-business. I have been an entrepreneur twice in my life and treasured the opportunity to try to make a profit from my ideas and my labor. But I also realize that all of us benefit from the freedom, infrastructure, and regulations that "WE the People" have covenanted together to create as a society. I owe a big part of my profits to support that joint effort.

On social issues I am libertarian. I believe there needs to be an important societal reason to limit individual freedom. Therefore:

• Despite the fact that I personally abhor the idea of abortion except in the case of rape or incest or an endangered mother, I believe we should leave that decision to the pregnant woman. 

• My homosexual friends, relatives, and students seem to be, at least to the same degree as their heterosexual contemporaries, happy and stable and contributing members of society. I see no legitimate societal reason to criminalize their ‘pursuit of happiness' or limit their freedom to marry. 

• I grew up in segregation and have seen cruel and unkind treatment of folks because of race.  I still see my black students and friends facing discrimination. I despise racial prejudice and intolerance.

• I believe that our society is much too diverse for us to allow mixture of religion in government. When I think of my Jewish, Sihk, Muslim, and atheist friends, relatives, and students, I do not want them mistreated because of their (or their parents) religious belief or non-belief.

I have tremendous respect for many of my conservative friends, students, relatives. Some have been my heroes since I was a child. Many are smart, kind, and prinicipled. I am very uncomfortable to be in such disagreement with some of them, but I am. The primary reason I started my blog was to be able to express my political opinions without acrimony.

I hope this gives a better understanding of my views.