It’s not just Ebenezer Scrooge who’s visited by ghosts at Christmas | Opinion

In 1978, my bride and I celebrated our first Christmas together in a cramped apartment on the second floor of a clapboard house. We had mold growing up our living room’s walls and a smothering stand-alone gas stove for heat.

We’d been married a month. Renee was 18. She clerked that winter at the J. C. Penney store downtown in Mount Sterling. I was 22 and a clerk in a Belk-Simpson store a couple of blocks away.

The $400 we’d set up housekeeping with was long since spent on rent and a few sticks of used furniture. We sometimes walked to work because we couldn’t afford gas for our old car.

One day Renee had come by Belk’s to meet me for our walk home. As she milled around waiting for my shift to end, I noticed her staring longingly at a pair of knee-high, lace-up leather boots that were stylish at the time.

“I love those,” she said when I joined her.

I looked at the price tag. $40. A fortune.

What I don’t remember 45 years later is where I got the money.

But I did. A few days after she spotted those boots, somehow I bought them and wrapped them up in a much bigger box — at Belk’s gift wrap station, if I recall — and put them under our little Charlie Brown of a Christmas tree at home.

I needed to make up a story to hide what I’d done. Hence the outsized box. I told her I’d found a deal on a lamp for the living room, as we were virtually sitting in the dark. I said we could open it on Christmas morning. It would be a gift to us both. She seemed to accept that.

But she was always relentlessly curious. She kept asking questions about the lamp. After a few days of interrogation, I turned melodramatic. How could I been that stupid, I said. I’ve spent good money on a lamp. I should have bought something just for you. I’m an idiot, I said. I’m a bad husband.

Finally Christmas morning arrived. We sat on the floor by the tree.

“Why don’t you open the stupid lamp?” I said. “I can’t bear to look at it.”

Without much enthusiasm, she tore the wrapping paper, popped the tape on the box. She pulled out the boot box and tossed it aside, oblivious, searching for the lamp among all the extra paper I’d stuffed the box with.

I pushed the boot box back toward her. “I think it’s in there,” I said.

Her expression went from puzzlement — why is a lamp in a boot box? — to surprise, to irritation, to joy, all in about five seconds. She lifted the lid off the boot box.

She squealed. She thrust the boots aloft, one in each hand. She hugged me, boots, arms and all.

It was a Christmas to remember. And I do.

But then, I remember so many Christmases.

‘Haunted by ghosts’

Every year, I try to revisit some iteration of Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol.” One year I may reread his original novella. The next I’ll watch a film adaption. Once I took two of my granddaughters to Louisville to see a version on the stage.

“A Christmas Carol” gets me every time. When a redeemed Scrooge awakens on Christmas morning to find he’s still alive, I invariably choke back tears.

Maybe it speaks to me because every Christmas I find myself, like Ebenezer Scrooge, haunted by ghosts.

I don’t have to go to sleep, or even close my eyes, to see my ghosts. They come unbidden. They rattle no chains. They’re uniformly kind. But they’re as real to me as Jacob Marley was to Scrooge.

I smell the coal burning at my grandparents’ farmhouse in Pulaski County, that being the only heat in the room. I feel the cold on whichever part of me is turned away from the roaring fireplace. I smell my grandfather’s flannel shirt — tobacco smoke, coal smoke and Aqua Velva afer shave — as we sit together on a vinyl sofa opening presents. Papa’s been dead since 1968, and yet I can hear him laugh, plain as anything.

I see the crowded den in my parents’ double-wide trailer, the tree shimmering and the presents packed three or four feet deep. I hear the chattering of my son, John, and my nephew, Will, grade-schoolers then, and watch them circle the tree in delirious anticipation. I see my dad, wearing his Santa hat, grinning as he shoos the boys away. I smell the aroma of warm turkey and dressing and pies wafting in from my mom’s kitchen.

I see a more recent Christmas. The birth of a new grandchild has broken up our holiday routine on this year. My wife, Liz, and I have been left to fend for ourselves. We’re melancholy: no grandkids will be over to celebrate at our house.

We tramp off to a Waffle House for our Christmas breakfast. Turns out it’s packed with people who, like us, have no place else to go. We all sit cheek to jowl at tables and counters. We chat and laugh and eat. The windows are steamed up. Our waitress tells us about the gifts she’s bought for her child. The food is hot and filling. Liz and I have a glorious time despite ourselves. Thirteen years later it still comes back to me how wondrous that morning was.

Every Christmas I, like old Ebenezer Scrooge, am thrilled to find myself still alive, to have been given the immeasurable privilege of yet another chance to get life right, to love and be loved, to celebrate this glorious day with family and friends — including those I’ve only now met.

Wherever you are, whatever you’re going through, whoever has passed on to the other side, Christmas is a gift if you’re willing to receive it. You can share it with those dearest to you if you’re lucky enough to have them, or with strangers if you’re not so lucky. Even if you’re alone, you can bask among ghosts from Christmases past.

God bless us, every one.

Paul Prather is pastor of Bethesda Church near Mount Sterling. You can email him at pratpd@yahoo.com.