Recent events in San Bernardino have led the usual suspects to engage in the usual hand-wringing about the abomination of celebrating Christmas among those for whom December 25 has no significance beyond being a day off from work. In this new reality, we troglodytes here in “Flyover-ville” are enjoined to remember that what we think is hospitality and good wishes for all is an horrific breach of etiquette which is responsible for all manner of discomfort, offence, emotional distress and even atrocity on the part of a substantial chunk of our compatriots. These worthies demand that we subordinate our behavior, beliefs and culture to others who, by implication, are too emotionally fragile to understand the phrase, “Peace on Earth, good will toward men.” When I hear these breathless pronouncements, I’m reminded of something my father told me long ago.

My father was born in April of 1917 in Rush Tower, Missouri on the northeast fringe of the Ozark Mountains. It is a place so obscure that Wikipedia does not have page for it. He was born into a world without electricity or telephones or antibiotics. He watched his mother die of tuberculosis when he was ten, came of age during the Depression and participated in the Second World War.

I am his oldest child, born in 1960, when he was forty-three years old.

As one might imagine, during my adolescence in the mid to late 1970’s, I was treated to numerous stories about life in the first half of the Twentieth Century, most along the lines of “walking five miles to and from school in the driving snow, uphill both ways.”

In the wisdom of my youth, I would smile and nod politely while trying to ignore whatever he was saying. Of course, now in my dotage, I wish I remembered more of the stories and more of the details of those that did make an impression.

After my father joined the Navy as an officer during World War II, he was sent for a training course to Fort Dix, New Jersey and was to be there during Christmas. As a bachelor officer, he was required to stay on post while those with wives and families were allowed leave.

Nonetheless, it was not to be a completely solitary holiday. Recall, it was a different time and in the area there were families who offered to provide a holiday meal to servicemen who had nowhere else to go.

Dad was the recipient of such an offer, and so, on Christmas Eve, 1942, he made his way via train and subway to an address in Brooklyn, New York. It was a multifamily flat, and Dad had been informed that the family had two small girls. He had stopped at a store and purchased some small dolls for the girls and a poinsettia for the lady of the house.

He arrived at the appointed time and discovered the following fact:

His hosts were Jews, originally from central Europe.

As he walked into their home, he saw a small decorated Christmas tree and smelled a turkey cooking. He told me, he’d only had turkey perhaps four or five times in his life prior to that moment, and those were of the “shot it m’self” variety.

The girls were there and they giggled a lot because, “they thought my dialect was ‘funny.’ When their parents were out of the room, they asked me to say sentences, so that they could laugh. They liked the dolls, though, so on balance I was OK in their eyes.”

His hosts, whose surname I’ve forgotten if I ever knew it, asked him about his life and his home in Missouri, a place which to them must have sounded like Outer Mongolia. They had come to America from Europe during the late ‘30s and now worried about not receiving word from relatives they’d left behind.

Dad told me, that at the time, he just chalked up the lack of communication to the vicissitudes of war. He had no idea.

The other thing Dad mentioned was that they served him wine. Understand Dad was from the absolutely temperate wing of the Baptist denomination, for which drinking alcohol was sin. My father believed that to his dying day, and I don’t think he ever had another drink again during his life. Yet he said he wasn’t going to turn down the hospitality of these people who had obviously taken the time and trouble to create a holiday for a serviceman they’d never met before. “I’m pretty sure God will give me a pass on that one.”

There were more details, but alas, I didn’t take the trouble to listen closely. I am the worse for it, I think. But what I remember is enough. A Jewish family helps a young Christian sailor celebrate Christmas far from home. That young Christian sailor honors their hospitality. No demands made, no offense taken. No denunciations for failing to respect traditions or engaging in cultural appropriation. Just decent human beings acknowledging and appreciating each other with respect and dignity.

Cheers.

Shermlaw