Christmas Joys

There’s something different, something special about Christmas in the country - a uniqueness which sets it apart from the same holiday in the city. Something more serene and seemingly more meaningful. A quieter, more reflective time. A time to actually contemplate what Christmas is really about.

Christmastime in the city is typified by hustle and bustle, tension and stress, and is certainly infinitely more expensive. Not so for a country Christmas.

In a rural area, Christmas is much more a time of fun and anticipation. A time for simple excitement, more meaningful giving, a truer grasp of the real spirit of the holiday.

Country folk do not get overly wrapped up in the commercial aspects of Christmas as is the case with most urban dwellers. They take more pleasure in simple gifts from the heart than store bought expressions of the holiday. Country folk tend to not place as much importance on the price of a gift as they do on the underlying meaning and thought put into it.

A batch of freshly baked cookies, homemade and delicious, packed into a nice Christmas tin, go a long way in satisfying the spirit of giving. Baking those favorite cookies takes much more thought and effort than purchasing a gift from some overcrowded store - much more.

Some country folk give the gift of doing a favor of love such as repairing an older person’s roof or doing odd jobs for another, especially an elder who may no longer be capable of doing such things themselves. They do so much more than their city cousins. Such expressions of thoughtfulness go a long way to assuage any guilt of not buying a present and, I suspect, are much more appreciated by the receiver.

In the country, one does not go to a tree lot to buy a dried out and sometimes scraggly, exorbitantly priced Christmas tree. Instead, in rural areas one packs their recently sharpened ax, heads to the nearest wooded area, scouts out the best pine tree there, and harvests it.

Tree cutting day is an exciting time for kids. I remember vividly my brothers and my adventures into the woods to find the perfect tree to take home. Most times we had scouted that tree for years prior to actually cutting it. We watched it grow year by year until it had reached just the right height for our living room. A few weeks before Christmas, and once we deemed it the best we could find, we cut it down, tied it to our Flexible Flyer sled, and slid it all the way home to the back porch. (There always seemed to be snow at that time of year.)

A tree freshly cut from the woods always seems to smell so much better, look more Christmassy, and provides infinitely more satisfaction than one bought at an urban tree lot. Always did for me anyway. I always felt sorry for city kids who never got to experience this pleasure.

Even a snow storm at Christmas is cause for celebration in the country whereas in the city it causes distress. City people may find themselves stranded in traffic or at airports. Tempers flare, rude behavior surfaces, and the Christmas spirit fades. Snow in the city at Christmas is not something to wonder at or enjoy for its serenity inducing effect.

In the countryside, as Robert Frost notes in his poem “Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening”, a snowstorm at Christmas is an event to appreciate and marvel at. It somehow enhances the spirit of the holiday. Robert Frost points this out. Even though he had “miles to go before I sleep”, he reins in the little horse pulling his sleigh while passing down a wooded country road at night to “watch his (a landowner’s) woods fill up with snow”. He takes a moment to observe the snow and even listen to the distinct sounds of a snowy evening where he notes “The only other sound’s the sweep, Of easy wind and downy flake”.

Country folk eagerly anticipate snow at Christmas; in fact, they are truly “dreaming of a white Christmas”.

Yes, Christmas in the country is manifested by the simple pleasures country folk get from simple things as opposed to a more consumer-minded, materialistically affected city dweller. One of my favorite gifts as a child was a pair of hand-knitted mittens I received each Christmas for many years from an elderly lady, a friend of the family, who must have spent countless hours of loving labor to make them special. They had my name knitted into them. I was the only kid in school who had mittens like that. I was as proud and appreciative of those warm hand coverings as I would have been had they been bought in the finest store on 5th Avenue in the busiest, most harried city at Christmas possibly in the world. Those mittens were something real and unique - bright colored, expertly made, and toasty warm even on the coldest days. Those Christmas mittens were an expression of how much the lady loved me and I knew it even at a young age.

Does anyone knit mittens for Christmas anymore?

Major Dennis Copson is retired from The United States Marines and is a resident of Oceanside, CA where he is the Director of Sales and Marketing for Nature’s Big Bud Liquid Worm Castings, Inc. He is also a freelance writer. More info is available on his websites at http://www.naturesbigbud.com.