Saturday, December 20, 1997

Grace comes on Christmas Eve: A Christmas memory

By REBEKAH SCOTT

Toledo Blade

Snow fell hard and heavy, and the hallways echoed with odd noises.

All the other girls had gone home for the holidays. Beth and I were left at our school in southern England. Mom, Dad, Grandma, Grandpa had sent a great box of wrapped gifts for the next morning's festivity. We'd shaken and handled each one with care and placed them back under the spindly English tree, probably erected for our benefit.

It was 1972, our first Christmas Eve away from our family.

Mom was in Germany, in a military hospital.

Dad was in Turkey, where we'd all lived together until a few weeks before. Marty, our baby sister, was sent home to Grandma's, in Pennsylvania, when our mother was diagnosed with cancer.

Mrs. Watkins, a worker at the school, had promised her two Yank girls a decent holiday at her house.

We'd been plied with caroling, a Christmas Eve service in the drafty, ancient church up the street, and Kellogg's Sugar Frosted Flakes for the morning's breakfast. She'd tucked us into our beds and told us, "Grace came out of darkness on Christmas Eve." There was a twinkle in her eye.

We recited for her the Christmas story, verbatim, from the Gospel of Luke. Mrs. Watkins was duly impressed.

Beth and I had memorized that chapter the year before and recited it at Christmas Eve family devotions. It had been a gift for our dad, who was a great lover of Scripture. We were a good, full-Gospel Christian family, and children like us knew "by heart" great swaths of the King James Bible.

("Thy word I have hid in my heart, that I might not sin against thee," we quoted, by way of explanation. "Psalms 119, verse 11.")

After the good lady left, I sat on Beth's bed and we held hands.

"Now we'd be lighting the candle behind the manger scene, and the star would shine," she said.

I felt myself choking up. "And then we'd all hold hands, and sing 'Silent Night.'

"We can still do that, you know," my big sister said.

"That would be stupid. This doesn't even feel like Christmas," I said. I brushed a tear off my cheek. "We should've gone to Grandma's with Marty. It's always raining here. The skirts itch. We're starting to sound like these people. We don't even sound American any more."

Beth didn't wait for me to finish. She was always interrupting me. She started right in, a little off-key: "Siii-lent Night. Hoo-oly Night ..."

Just for the sake of keeping her in tune, I kicked in the "all iscalm" part. We split into two-part harmony for the long sweep upward on "heavenly peeeeeaaaace." We did it very badly, because we both were crying.

"The hell with Christmas," I said, in my best 12-year-old imitation adult voice.

"Listen!" Beth said.

Outside the window where the draft floated through, someone said "Ho ho ho." We ran to peer past the frost, into the garden and over the street.

Out in the streetlight stood a snow-spotted man in U.S. Air Force dress blues, his arms full of packages. A taxi was pulling away. He was smiling. He turned toward the house.

He was Daddy.

We shrieked and ran for the door. Our harmony was perfect.

Grace comes out of the darkness, on Christmas Eve.

(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service.)