A CHRISTMAS I'LL NEVER FORGET

When Irving Berlin wrote "White Christmas", he wrote a song that captures the nostalgia of the season for a lot of us. My favorite Christmas memory is about a white Christmas too, but a different kind of white. My parents ranch was in a small California town called Galt. Galt is about 20 minutes south of Sacramento, and our ranch was about 20 minutes further out into the country from town. Located in the heart of the San Joaquin Valley, during the winter months we have a heavy, dense, low lying fog we call "Tule" Fog. Christmas Eve started out like it always did. Mama made Norwegian meatballs, creamed peas & onions, lefse (a scandinavian potato pancake), and of course mashed potatoes and gravy. She usually had large canisters of cookies she had been baking for days. My two sisters and I would hang around the kitchen while she worked, under the auspices of "helping" when actually we were "sampling". When it was time to set the table, I slipped out to the barn. My favorite tradition was feeding the livestock on Christmas Eve. When I was a little girl, daddy showed me how to set an apple on the palm of my hand. "Curve your fingers down so the horses don't bite you accidentally" he would say. And I would giggle at the feel of the soft, velvety muzzle of the horses as they would pick the apple off my hand. We raised registered Hereford cattle, and had bull calves in the barn that we were raising to sell. Christmas Eve, with the damp fog rolling in, everything smelled stronger. The scent of alfalfa filled my nostrils, and when I opened the feed bins, the rich smell of the molasses soaked oats reminded me of mama's ginger cookies waiting in those cookie tins. All the animals got extra feed on Christmas eve, even the ducks, dogs, and cats. I would climb up onto the corral fence and watch them all eat, their hungry breath hanging in white clouds of steam in the cold December night air. After dinner, we piled into mom's car and headed into town to St. Peter's Church for a candlelight service. It was the one time of year my father sang the hymns in church. Mama was a fine singer, and dad was rather intimidated by her. He didn't have perfect pitch, but while I got mama's pitch, dad's deeper resonance was his gift to me. On the way home the fog began rolling in thicker. Once we were past the lights of town we couldn't see three feet in front of us. Not having fog lamps we used the next best thing... my kid sister. Perched on the hood of the car, she would motion left or right letting mama know where the white dividing line was. A twenty minute drive that night took over an hour and we were glad to see the lights from the barn as we turned down our road. Once inside we pulled off coats and boots and mama got out the cookies. We were all gathered around the table when the power went out. Staying with friends in town was an option, but that meant another hour with my sister on the hood of the car. Instead we decided to stay home. My sisters and I slept three in the bed that night for warmth, and giggled for hours. Finally mom came into the bedroom and said in the same exasperated tone of voice she had used for years that "if you girls don't pipe down I'm going to have to separate you!". This brought more peals of laughter. The youngest of the three of us was 24 years old!