THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, December 25, 1994 TAG: 9412250075
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: ELIZABETH SIMPSON
LENGTH: Medium: 71 lines
As I write this column, I'm still waiting for the Christmas spirit to hit me.
I hope by the time you read this it will have slipped in like an unexpected guest in the night.
That's the way it usually does. You can't buy it, or put it on your credit card. You can't induce it with a gallon of eggnog or blast it into the season with Christmas carols. You can't force it with one more viewing of ``It's a Wonderful Life.''
It just comes. And sometimes, just when you least expect it, the spirit makes its most sterling appearance. It's like that old gospel song line, ``He may not come when you want him to, but He's right on time.''
Val Rook knows. Out of more than 20 years of marriage to her husband, she best remembers Christmas in Oklahoma.
They had moved there in September 1981 with dreams of oil-boom wealth. By Christmas they were flat out of money and living in an 18-foot camping trailer. But their four daughters, all under age 5, expected Christmas.
There was no money for a tree, and the trailer wasn't big enough to hold one anyway. So Rook and her husband trooped out on the plains of Oklahoma and picked out the best, most well-rounded tumbleweed they could find. They spray-painted it green, decorated it and squeezed it in by the kitchen sink.
There was Christmas cheer all around that year. Rook can still see her daughters' bright faces as they gathered round the tumbleweed in that drafty trailer.
The next month, the family packed it in and moved back home. But the memory of that spartan Christmas with the tumbleweed tree lived on through the years. ``Today we have a beautiful house and our daughters are teens,'' says Rook, who lives in Chesapeake. ``But every year that Christmas comes to mind because we had so little . . . yet so much.''
Like Rook, the year I remember best was when the Christmas spirit didn't arrive until the 11th hour.
I was about 10 years old and wishing for a white Christmas. Early on Dec. 24 it started to snow. And snow and snow and snow, until the weatherman declared it a blizzard.
I was ecstatic until the electricity lines iced over and broke, plunging us into darkness. No lights, no hot chocolate, no twinkling Christmas bulbs, no Rudolph.
In my mind, no Christmas Eve at all. I was in tears.
But my parents built a huge fire in the fireplace of our rambling house and got out all the candles they could find. We played board games by candlelight, popped popcorn over the fire and ran to the window every few minutes to watch the unstoppable snow blanket our small Midwestern town.
I know I must have had a wish list about a mile long that year, but I don't remember a single present I got. What I do remember are the faces of my parents and sister in the warm glow of the candles that Christmas Eve. And how we laughed for hours over the Parcheesi board. And then padded up the steps with flashlights when it was time for bed.
The Christmas spirit doesn't arrive on demand. And when it does, it isn't always as dramatic as in the movies. It can come in a single moment. In the sprig of a tumbleweed or the glimmer of a candle. And sometimes you don't even notice it was there until years have passed.
But it was there all the same.
Merry Christmas. May the spirit be with you. ILLUSTRATION: Color photo
JOSEPH JOHN KOTLOWSKI/Staff
Val Rook recalls making a Christmas tree out of a tumbleweed and
celebrating with her husband and daughters, from top left, Rebecca,
Rachel, Renee and Robin.
by CNB