Christmas 2010

Photo by Ivan Stepanov on Unsplash

It’s Christmas Eve 2010, and no, there’s no snow in the forecast.

I’d been checking every day for weeks. Even though it will be in the 30s (we’ve had a few Christmases in the 60s—it’s heartbreaking), I know it won’t snow. I’d never had a white Christmas—we only get two to three good snow days a year in Johnson City, Tennessee, and the odds of that being on Christmas are slim.

I tell myself not to get my hopes up, but once again, I checked the forecast every day.

It’s my first Christmas home from college. I’ve been looking forward to this since September in Anthropology 105, when the summer-camp vibe of college wore off. I missed home and was tired of hearing about how religious beliefs are social constructs made up by my distant ancestors who discovered that sticks were tools and weren’t just for scratching their butts.

But now it’s Christmas Eve. I’m home, and we’re on I-26 on our way to Unicoi to see my mom’s parents.

We’ve just swung around Buffalo Mountain, heading back into the valley between Pinnacle Mountain and big Unaka, 5,000 feet above the valley.

Dad is looking through the dark and the pine trees at our old white house on the hill in Unicoi. He will wonder aloud, half to himself, if we ever should have moved from there into town.

At least he has on Michael Martin Murphey’s Cowboy Christmas. Many things change at Christmas, but Michael Martin Murphey in the Scott house isn’t one of them.

I’m looking up at the radio towers on Buffalo Mountain, their red lights blinking in the sky. We’ve made this drive every Christmas Eve, and one time, my brother convinced me one of those lights was Rudolph.

Now that I think about it, as a kid when we sang “Go Tell It on the Mountain” and sang about the heavenly host singing to those shepherds, I saw Buffalo Mountain in my mind. I imagined all those angels glowing and singing right there above those radio towers.

We get off the interstate in Unicoi at the Maple Grove exit. We’ll drive through town past the VW Bug decked out in Christmas lights with a light-up Santa inside.

We’ll turn up Tall Pine Road to the little log house where Nana and Dee Daw live. Nana has red lights in the windows, like every Christmas I’ve been alive.

We pull our coats around our necks on the walk from the car to her door. Inside, her house is warm and smells like the hot rolls she’s just put into a basket with a red napkin on top. After Nana hugged me, she told me she’s got the grape jelly on the table for me, because grape jelly on one of those rolls would make an atheist sing in the Christmas choir.

My Uncle Alan, Aunt Leah, and Cousin Drew are there. Leah gives me a hug, and I tell her how good I’ve been brushing my teeth (she’s a dental hygienist). Alan smiles, says hello, shakes my hand, and continues telling my grandfather how he hasn’t filled up the gas tank on his truck since July.

Cousin Drew and I make the same joke every Christmas: “This is real nice, Clark, real nice,” a click of the tongue and the okie-dokie hand sign with a wink—Cousin Eddie from Christmas Vacation. It never gets old because we only quote it once a year.

After dinner, I, as the youngest grandchild, will be the one to rush everyone into the sitting room to open presents (though I’m much cooler about it at 19 than I was at 7, I’m still the first one in there).

There aren’t enough seats for everyone, so Alan and my dad sit on the piano bench.

After the presents, Nana brings out the stockings with a plastic candy cane filled with M&Ms, spearmint gum, and two pairs of socks.

We’ve done Christmas the same every year, down to the socks in the stockings.

I don’t know it yet, but this will be the last Christmas Eve we’ll spend at this log house. Nana and Dee Daw have faithfully tended this house on the mountain for decades. They deserve a condo in town that doesn’t leave so many splinters in your hands, creak in your knees, and have so many stairs.

We hug their necks, grab our bags of presents, and head home.

Michael Martin Murphey is singing, Dad’s looking through the pines and the dark at our old house, and I’m looking out at those radio towers, thinking about Rudolph and the Heavenly Host.

Ah, well. Tomorrow, I’ll wake up and open an Xbox 360 or a new guitar or something—I don’t remember. And after, as we eat pancakes with the fancy syrup in the glass bottle, I’ll think how quickly it went by this year. How it got away from me, slipped into the sky with those memories, and floated off toward the Heavenly Host above the radio towers on Buffalo Mountain.

And then I looked out the window and saw snowflakes falling.