I am always compelled to write but do not often yield to it, after all, it is work. But, tonight i was watching the Mormon Tabernacle Choir performing their Christmas Special and it was fabulous! As I could smell the pine boughs and feel the cold wet snow I imagined I was a boy again in a small Mormon town with my grandparents in their old classic home on a dirt street. That was long ago and I have been homeless at Christmas since.
My parents, both from small Mormon communities, migrated to Wyoming to teach music and start a business. They had the most loftiest of ideals and good clean living enforced by their church Ward as they called it then. They became well known and loved in those communities as they grew their clan to six children and success soon followed.
Christmas was mostly wonderful to me as a small boy. I remember the elegantly decorated home and a freezer full of home made rolls and pies that we could never quite keep our hands off. My mom was so mad because we could eat it almost as fast as she made those delights, as well as home made fudge to die for, and I almost did!
Then we always made the trek to Utah to visit my parents families in Santiquin and Payson. The long, seemed like twenty four hours or more, drives were torturous and to keep from killing my little sister and not to mention my other siblings, we had to be creative. My eldest brother Bill always seemed like an uncle since he was fourteen years my senior and in school somewhere. We learned to make lanyards from long pieces of craft plastic stuff and even zig-zag looking paper creations made from stick bubble gum wrappers.
Next came every little town that had a stop sign on that then only two lane highway and then, of course, we passed the cemetery and came to the famous corny joke. The question was, “do you know how many dead people are in this cemetery?” And the obvious answer was, ” All of them!” We fell for it every-time until we were past being grown up. We almost had a rating system for each little ho-dunk town on that two lane highway on who had the best Christmas decorations on their main street.
The last straw of boredom was reserved for the dark when we could no longer count license plates or hit each other. We called it twenty-one. Every one got a turn to play and had to pick any object and gave only one clue on whether the object was organic or inorganic. The rest of us had to guess the item or lose to the one who was so clever to deceive us all. It is amazing how far one can get with twenty questions!
Finally we were there and Grandma Broadbent would always lay out a huge table full of food at a moments notice. It was amazing, if not a little dysfunctional as I now know. She would hug us and kiss us with wet sloppy kisses and doted on us. My mom never did that. I supposed because she never had the time. But we, as kids, feasted on the attention we got from both sides of our families.
Then there were tons of cousins! If my parents had six kids and others had six kids in those Mormon Communities, we had a lot of cousins and had a blast! We played in the street irrigation systems and pulled blood suckers off our legs later. It was pure fun and heaven for me followed by the best kid food made-by my Uncle Richard.
We always had a huge car, usually a station wagon that became a huge Buick as more kids left¬† for college. I could always sleep on the floor of those huge cars as they purred going home. They always left for the trip home at night or late afternoon knowing we would sleep most of the way home. I always cried when we left to go back to ‘ole Wyoming. It was so green in Utah and we could always get the best apples and pears and corn and pine nuts to bring back. A piece of me was lost in Utah and never regained in those early years.
We were growing up and made fewer trips to Utah for Christmas. We still had the elegant decorated home and cool gifts, but something was missing.
I think I found it in several bottles hidden in book cases, laundry room and behind the towells in the  bathroom; it was filled with a clear water like fluid and I poured it out and filled it back up with water thinking I had fooled the offender which turned out to be my mother. This was in the fifth grade.
[ To be continued...]
Posted under Posts
This post was written by keithblog on December 16, 2009
