It was Christmastime 1974. I was ten years old, but I was not looking forward to Christmas that year.
The previous spring my mother and the man who was to become my stepfather—when all the divorces were finalized and he and my mother could marry—had moved our family from rural central Alabama to sunny Southern California. My little brother, Todd, and I were leaving behind our father and all our extended family.
This would be my first Christmas away from Alabama.
My beautiful and elegant mother took to California like a swan to a royal lake. My soon-to-be stepfather was a California native. My athletic little brother reveled in a temperate climate that allowed him to be outdoors eleven months of the year.
I, however, was a fat, awkward child with a high-pitched voice and a heavy southern accent. I was having extreme difficulty with the transition to a West Coast lifestyle.
There are few things more harrowing than changing schools midterm. My first day at my new school, I went to the front of my fourth-grade class to introduce myself.
All I said was my name and where I was from, and the class erupted in laughter, with jeers of “He talks funny” and “He has a weird accent.”
It took the teacher two minutes to restore order, and she was angry at me for having caused a disruption.
I was so disillusioned after that first day that instead of walking home after school, I went to a nearby gas station and used the phone booth there to try and place a collect call to Granny Smith, my paternal grandmother.
Granny Smith was my biggest ally. I was going to ask her if I could return to Alabama and live with her and if she would send me the money for a bus ticket home. But the line was busy, and despite several attempts I didn’t get through.
To make matters worse, my mother was always encouraging, nagging, and badgering me to lose weight and trying to help in that endeavor with whatever the latest diet craze was.
She had been a fat child, but with puberty she had gained height and lost weight and undergone the proverbial ugly-duckling transformation to become a great beauty in high school. She saw weight loss as the panacea of all problems and believed it to be the key to my happiness. She was very happy to have me away from the annual holiday sugar binges and weight gain that my Granny Smith’s cooking provided.
Granny Smith was, for me, everything good about Christmas.
Her language of love was food. She was an excellent baker and candy maker and would spend weeks cooking in preparation for Christmas Eve, when all of her children and grandchildren would gather at her house.
Every favorite dish, dessert, and confection was made to specification. Her table and sideboard groaned under the weight of all the food. My cousins, my brother, and I would burst through her back door, brimming with anticipation, our arrival announced by the chime of five silver bells suspended on red velvet ribbons from a plastic poinsettia bouquet, which hung on the door.
Her house was tiny and saturated with tacky Christmas decorations and cigarette smoke. But to my childhood aesthetic, it was glorious.
She sewed new pajamas for all of her grandchildren. She scoured catalogs, newspaper advertisements, and stores all over town to get us exactly the toy we had requested.
She was interested in me and my happiness.
She was my solace. She was my resilience. She was magical.
I missed her desperately.
It was Sunday evening, and I was moping around the house, dreading Monday and the return to school. Fortunately, there was only one week left before the Christmas break. I was longing for my familiar southern Christmas. My stepfather and my mother had finally gotten married in Vegas over the summer, and we had spent Thanksgiving with his extended family.
They were polite, kind people, but I did not know them. I fit poorly into their established routine, and I feared that Christmas would be more of the same.
The phone rang. It was Granny Smith. She often took advantage of the discounted long-distance rates after 7:00 p.m. on Sundays.
My brother and I chatted with her for nearly half an hour. She sent her love, asked us about school and our life, assured us she had found the toys that we wanted and they would be there by Christmas.
But before she hung up, she asked to speak to our mother. This request made my brother and me very nervous.
When our parents divorced, they didn’t so much dissolve a marriage as declare war on each other. We knew that the campaigns and battles of this war could be long and brutal. My mother considered Granny Smith to be in the enemy camp. They maintained a civil but strained relationship, and my brother and I were always anxious when they spoke to each other.
Granny Smith informed Mother that she had shipped a Christmas package and it should arrive in the coming week.
My mother said, “Thank you, but I hope you did not have to spend a lot of money. It is very expensive to ship things across the country.”
Despite their differences my mother respected and understood that Granny Smith was a woman of very modest means. She had been a widow for nearly thirty years and had worked mostly menial jobs. For her, money was always scarce.
Granny said, “It wasn’t very expensive at all, and I was happy to do it.”
They exchanged polite but tense pleasantries, wished each other a Merry Christmas, and then said good-bye. My brother and I breathed a sigh of relief.
Sure enough, Thursday afternoon after school the phone rang, but it wasn’t the US Postal Service—it was the Greyhound Bus Lines calling to say we had a package waiting at the bus terminal in Claremont, California.
My mother said to the clerk on the phone, “I didn’t even know that Greyhound shipped packages.”
“Oh, yes,” the clerk said. “In fact, we’re the cheapest around. We’re far cheaper than the US Postal Service because we don’t deliver door-to-door.”
This annoyed my mother, because the bus station was nearly ten miles away. The clerk informed her that the bus station was open twenty-four hours a day and that there was someone on duty at the shipping desk around the clock. We could pick the package up at any time.
So after supper we drove to the bus station. We went in to see the clerk. He confirmed that we had a package.
And then he said to my mother, “You can pull your car around into the loading bay.”
Mother said, “What for?”
The clerk said, “The package is too large to hand over the counter.”
My mother looked at the clerk and said, “Are you sure you’ve got the right package?”
I could tell the clerk was getting a little annoyed.
He learned over the counter and looked at my brother and me and said, “Are you Lee and Todd Smith?”
We nodded our heads and said, “Yes, sir.”
He said, “Then this package is for you. I’ll meet you guys around back at the loading bay.”
Our mother drove us around back, and the shipping clerk came to our car with a hand truck carrying a heavily reinforced cardboard box, large enough to hold a dishwasher or a small refrigerator.
He said, “This barely makes it inside the maximum size dimensions and weight restrictions,” as he hoisted the box into our trunk and went to get some twine to tie the trunk lid closed.
My brother and I were giddy with anticipation on the way home, wondering what the box contained. Our mother was not in such a good humor. She knew her ex-mother-in-law well and was suspicious of the box.
When we got home, we had to go inside and get our stepfather—the box was too heavy for us to get out of the car.
He grunted and complained as he set the box down in the living room, and said, “What the hell did she send, a jeweler’s safe?”
We tore into the box, and the smell of our granny’s house wafted into the air: a combination of fried meat, grease, furniture polish, and cigarette smoke.
There beneath wadded newspaper and excelsior was our southern Christmas.
There were presents wrapped in decorative paper and bows to go under the Christmas tree. Neatly folded in brown paper was a new set of pajamas for each of us. There were also two five-count packs of Fruit of the Loom underwear in the appropriate sizes for us both.
There was a countless number of decorative tins and repurposed Cool Whip containers.
We opened them to discover mounds of homemade Christmas treats:
Divinity.
Fudge.
Boiled chocolate cookies.
Parched peanuts.
A massive container of “nuts and bolts,” which is what southerners call homemade Chex Party Mix (but to which no prepackaged Chex Party Mix will ever compare).
A whole fruitcake.
A chocolate pound cake.
She even included our traditional stocking stuffers of candy bars, chewing gum, citrus fruits, and pecans and walnuts in the shell.
The box was as bottomless as Mary Poppins’s satchel. As each sugary confection came out of the box, my brother and I shrieked with delight and our mother moaned in defeat.
Mother tried a last-ditch effort to hide all the confections and dole them out a few at a time, but each evening when our stepfather would come home, he would begin to search for them and our mother’s scheme would be thwarted.
Eventually she gave up and just left it all out on the kitchen counter.
Each Christmas that we spent in California, Greyhound would call and say that our package had arrived. Over the years many treasures arrived in the box: hand-crocheted afghans, an heirloom family quilt, handmade Christmas decorations.
A check to help with the purchase of my first car.
For me it was always the best part of Christmas. Even after I moved out of the house, the box continued to arrive. My roommates and friends at college were always astounded and delighted with the contents of the box.
My granny was able to package and ship magic and love.
Granny is long gone and missed more each year. Since her death I have discovered in conversations with my cousins that Granny came to the rescue of all of her grandchildren at one time or another, softening what would have been hard and harmful emotional landings.
She did it in such a way that we each thought we were her favorite.
Granny had endured a sad and difficult childhood with a mother who suffered from mental illness. She understood the importance of a child having an ally when a parent fails them.
Each year, a few days after Thanksgiving, I now hang the plastic poinsettia bouquet with the bells on my front door to announce the arrival of holiday guests. I have mastered many of my grandmother’s recipes (though good divinity still eludes me).
When the Christmas season arrives, I lovingly remember Granny and cherish that the magic and resilience she gave is still with me.
During the holidays when I see a Greyhound bus on the highway, I think to myself, In the belly of that machine may travel some child’s Christmas.
LEONARD LEE SMITH has been a licensed hairdresser for twenty years. He holds a BA in theater from Auburn University at Montgomery. Before becoming a hairdresser and storyteller, he was a costumer at the Alabama Ballet, the Texas Shakespeare Festival, and the Alabama Shakespeare Festival. He was an AmeriCorps volunteer with Birmingham AIDS outreach. He learned the craft of storytelling from his southern grandmother, Ray Ceil, a woman with a meticulous memory and a razor-sharp wit. Lee’s heartfelt and humorous stories include personal tales, those of his grandmothers and those gathered while giving people one of the most important tools needed to get through life: a good hairstyle. The Moth met Lee through the Birmingham, Alabama, storytelling group ARC Stories. This past Christmas he finally mastered his grandmother’s divinity recipe.
This story was told on July 13, 2017, at the Thurber Arts Center in Huntsville, Alabama. The theme of the evening was Save Me. Director: Catherine Burns.
