So, how was your Christmas? Ours was good. Now that we’re in an Orthodox church that follows the Old Calendar, December 25 is a trial run for the Nativity celebration in January. But we still celebrate the day with presents and everything but the church service. We joined family members and others on Christmas Eve, just before dusk, and lit candles on all the graves in the Starhill Cemetery, according to the tradition started over a decade ago by Ruthie and our mother. You might recall this passage from The Little Way of Ruthie Leming:

Christmas was coming in six days, and we still had some presents to buy for the kids. To make matters more challenging, Mam had said earlier in the month that she was too sad to make Christmas dinner this year, so Julie and I offered to host it at our place – this, even though we would be living out of boxes. We knew this first Christmas without Ruthie would be hard on her, especially given that Mam’s birthday is on Christmas Eve. We were eager to do whatever we could to ease her burden.

This year, Mam and Ruthie’s Christmas Eve tradition of lighting candles in the Starhill Cemetery would, sadly, be broken. Neither Mam nor Hannah had it within herself to continue. Mam told me she and Paw were planning to go to services at the Methodist church, and home to bed early. They didn’t feel up to coming by the Dreher family Christmas gathering at my cousin Andy’s place. They wanted to be alone, and quiet, with their grief.

Just after sunset, while Mam and Paw were at church, I drove out to their house to pick up some presents I had stored in Paw’s barn. Passing the Starhill Cemetery, I saw hundreds of pinpricks flickering in the darkness, like stardust sprinkled on the thick blanket of night. I guessed that Mam found the strength to uphold the tradition after all.

Half an hour later, I was having a drink in Andy’s living room when my mobile phone rang. It was Mam. She sounded distraught.

“Rod, did you see the cemetery?” she said.

“Yes, it was beautiful,” I said. “You did a wonderful job.”

“It wasn’t me baby,” she said, choking through her tears. “I don’t know who did it. Some kind soul lit the candles tonight. Oh, baby, whoever that was, they’ll never know what they did for me tonight. They’ll never, ever know.”

A friend and neighbor, Susan Wymore, and her husband had done it that year, out of gratitude for Ruthie and Mam having done it for so long. Susan has ancestors buried in that cemetery, as do many of us here in Starhill, and also twin infant sons.

We went to the annual Dreher clan Christmas party, and had the customary blast. My cousin Kevin brought a homemade concoction called cherry bounce, which he made by macerating wild cherries from his backyard tree in sugar and bourbon for six months. It was really something special. After gumbo, we sang carols around the piano. My son Lucas is getting good at the piano, and played a boogie-woogie version of Jingle Bells that he improvised. And then we all went outside for the massive fireworks show. Those Drehers shot off so many that cars were pulling over on Highway 61 to watch the sky light up. Here were a bunch of us; you would have thought we were observing the mothership from Close Encounters of the Third Kind landing:

The kids woke us up at 2 a.m. to open presents — this, even though this is the first Christmas we’ve had without Santa. Nora found out the truth a couple of months ago while looking something up in the dictionary, and discovering that the definition for Santa begins with the words, “An imaginary elf…”. Julie told them to go back to sleep. They came back at five. It turns out Lucas hadn’t slept at all. There’s a reason that the phrase “like kids on Christmas morning” resonates. The photo I chose to illustrate the top of this post (remember, I don’t publish images of my children’s faces) is one I took of Nora with one of her favorite presents: a teacup and a tin of loose tea from Mariage Frères, the French seller of premium tea. Nora loves hot tea, and fell hard for Mariage Frères when we were in Paris. She told me tonight that in her dream house, there would be a room big enough to hold every kind of tea Mariage Frères sells. We bought her a tin of Montagne d’Or, and a tin of Esprit de Noël. I tried them both with her today, and I’m just knocked out by how great everything Mariage Frères does is.

She got a bike too, but the Mariage Frères stuff seems to have been her favorite. She’s in bed now reading a book about tea that her grandparents bought her.

For the teenager obsessed with Soviet pop culture, as my son Matthew is, nothing says “Merry Christmas” like a Gary Shteyngart book:

Alas, I have no photo of Lucas with his stuff. He crashed hard at 11:30 a.m., and didn’t get out of bed till nine tonight. I think he’s coming down with the flu. He got a bike too, and rode the hell out of it today until he couldn’t go any more.

We went to the Lemings for lunch and had such a good time. And tonight, Ryan Booth, who comments on this blog frequently, drove up from Baton Rouge for dinner. The man can make an amazing Italian meatball soup.

Lucas finally woke up, and is now in the living room on the couch watching Green Acres ad nauseam, which is kind of redundant, if you think about it. And how was your Christmas?