Twirling into Christmas magic
by Don Williams

Come see how we whirled and fussed and loved our way through time, lost in the largeness and largesse of magic, my brothers and sisters and I. Time was invisible and so slow it hardly passed at all. It was something you ran round in without fear of disturbing. How could you disturb the invisible, except through disbelief?

continued...

And what's not to believe, after all? Mama and Daddy were there---sipping coffee, opening mail, donning fancy clothes, preening before mirrors filled with dark-haired vanity, vitality. Comings and goings, laughter and tears, food and chores, music and fun filled our days and evenings in a world solid and unchanging in the larger scheme.

Christmas was a singularity—a self-contained world of myth and magic that grew as the season advanced toward a rumor only time could confirm. Christmas Past existed as an ever-receding legend. How could this promised future Christmas live up to such wonder? Scampering out among the hills and gullies, seeking the perfect tree for Daddy to chop down with his long axe helped hasten that most magical night.

Still, would it never get here? What if we'd been too bad for Santa Claus to leave presents? But no, there never was a time when one of us had been so bad that Santa didn't come to our house. My big brother Rodney, who must've been 11, and my older sister, Becky, who was 7, confirmed this for Tim and me. Kathleen was not yet in the world. This was before so many inconceivable people and things were in the world. But Santa, yes Santa would surely come, landing atop our peaked roof. We didn't have a chimney then, but he would find his way inside.

But when, Mama, and how? Soon enough, darlings, he's magic.

At times you could enter such magic--moments late at night when the cedar tree exuded spells and spirits in its twinkling. Other times magic feelings arrived like belly laughs, in roars of raucous abandon.

I must've been about five the year Daddy brought home the recording of Gene Autry's Christmas songs. The album cover showed a cowboy with a white hat standing above Santa and a bag full of presents that filled a sleigh to overflowing. Reindeer flew as if lofted on music between Gene's fancy boots, where he stood on air, and they flew right toward us, almost out into the room, where we stood holding the album cover, so that Rudolph was out front, up close.

Maybe you recall that most famous reindeer of all. Like us, he was small and misunderstood and yet he smiled with pride for a bulbous red nose that could light a path all the way around the world in one night. Surely Rudolph was the cleverest, the handsomest reindeer, if the truth be known. Gene Autry—a cowboy we knew well from TV reruns—would croon “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” in a voice too smooth to believe. And yet—at ages seven, five and three, respectively, oh how Becky, plump and happy, and I, dark and reserved, and Tim, red-haired and feisty, believed.

We would debate the nature of Santa's toy-bag. Was it like a spring, ever refreshed from inside? What if it fell off that flying sled and landed in our yard? Would thousands of presents flow from that bag on Christmas morning, covering our yard and house? How did Santa visit so many houses? There must be hundreds in Tennessee alone? Maybe even more where Daddy worked, in Knoxville. And what about America? Which was bigger, Knoxville or America or Tennessee? And these were not the only places! There was Africa, where Tarzan lived, and Briceville, where Grandma and Grandpa lived, and there was Sparta, where Granny lived with Aunts Linda and Lila and Uncle Sonny. And there was Dodge City and Virginia City and Texas and California, where cowboys rode horses, and there was the moon and Mars, where monsters lived.

The world was much larger then. There was no end to places Santa must visit, but visit them he would with Rudolph's help and elves. And I remember Mama dressed us up like elves and Daddy put that record about Rudolph on for us and we ran hand in hand, round the room, counter clockwise across the floor, up and bouncing across one twin bed, skipping back to the floor, over the other twin bed, back to the floor, falling, twirling, jumping, dancing round and round until the world spun like that 33 rpm record in the blue Victrola in this eternal Christmastime universe--twirling in breathless bliss—three siblings hand in hand, going round and round to revel in true magic—working ourselves up, flushed and sweating, laughing and dreaming out loud, intoxicated on Christmastime.

Believe me when I tell you that in some other blink in time's majesty—come see--we're twirling still.

Don Williams is a prize-winning columnist, short story writer and the founding editor and publisher of New Millennium Writings, an annual anthology of literary stories, essays and poems. His awards include a National Endowment for the Humanities Michigan Journalism Fellowship, a Golden Presscard Award and the Malcolm Law Journalism Prize. He just finished a novel, "Oracle of the Orchid Lounge," set in his native Tennessee. Publishers or agents may inquire via email. His book of selected journalism, "Heroes, Sheroes and Zeroes, the Best Writings About People" by Don Williams, is due a second printing. For more information, email donwilliams7@charter.net. Or visit the NMW website at www.NewMillenniumWritings.com. In 2007, he gave up his weekly column at the Knoxville News-Sentinel rather than see it cut back to every-other-week by his editors who endorsed Bush-Cheney. To support continuation of this column with a modest donation, please click here.