Denton County Magazine • Nov_Dec 21 • MAKE A MEMORY : A DENTON COUNTY HOLIDAY

Most of our 365 days a year come and go, with memories quickly turning to dust. But holidays are different. Thanksgiving meals and Christmas mornings stand out, and the reel-to-reel replays in our head become part of our brain’s permanent video library.

Denton County magazine asked nine residents to write a short essay about a certain holiday or holiday tradition that is meaningful to their lives. Some of them added advice on how to create a pleasant holiday. Read on for inspiration.

To you, from us at Denton County magazine: We hope you make a memory of a happy holiday this year.

The dollhouse I received when I was 12 is still my all-time favorite Christmas gift. My reaction to finding it on Christmas morning was pure joy, but I deserved an acting award after sneaking into the garage to watch the dollhouse take shape for months.

Wooden dollhouses were popular that year. They came preassembled in pastel shades with trim, roofing and a white interior ready for decoration. I didn’t ask for a dollhouse; my father was a minister, and my parents couldn’t afford a preassembled dollhouse. They probably saw my longing each time I disappeared into the dollhouse section at the hobby store. Mom and Dad solved the problem when Dad designed and built my dollhouse. Mom added creative touches with inexpensive readily available materials.

The dollhouse I received has a popsicle stick fence, contact paper floors, wood trim window boxes adorned with plastic flowers, and a hinged front door with a tiny lion’s head door knocker. It isn’t perfect, but it’s a custom-made expression of my parents’ love. That’s why I still cherish it.

My parents’ ability to create holiday magic within their means was another gift. Research shows many Americans dread the holidays because of pressure to buy elaborate gifts. Quality, not quantity, is what’s important. Overextending yourself isn’t worth it, and it likely won’t be appreciated.

Consider making a no present or gift exchange agreement with extended family and coworkers. Others might be relieved if you are honest about the stress of overspending. Handmade gifts are another option. My parents taught me to appreciate giving and receiving gifts made by hand with heart.

Annetta Ramsay, Ph.D., is a nationally licensed and certified counselor who runs the Chrysalis Group Treatment for Eating Disorders in Denton.

One Christmas Eve when I was in grade school, my brother Richard asked Mama if our family could make tamales. My other brothers and I were against working so much on Christmas, but Mama agreed! So her four grown sons and I had to work that day.

Next morning, instead of opening presents we dragged into the kitchen to work. Mama had Richard beat the masa. David boiled the pig’s head, Rudy made coffee, Henry assembled the meat grinder, and I soaked the corn chucks. None of us were happy about it and we grumbled under our breath. But Mama insisted.

About an hour later Rudy took a glop of masa and smeared it across David’s face! David’s eyes grew big as gumballs as he stared at Rudy in shock. Rudy giggled. Then Henry laid a wet corn chuck on top of Richard’s head. Richard poked his finger in the masa and stuck it in my ear. We grew silly with laughter as I jumped up and down.

Mama came into the kitchen and scolded us like children, but she laughed just as hard. Henry took off his shoe for a moment and David filled it with masa. Richard poured corn chuck water in Rudy’s coffee and burst out laughing when Rudy took a sip. All day we played and laughed and worked together, under Mama’s watch. We managed to make 20 dozen tamales through all the pranks and antics.

Mama made all of us wash up and put on our Sunday suits as the rest of the family arrived for Christmas dinner. Then she took our picture (shown above) and we settled down to fresh homemade tamales.

I am the last brother. And every Christmas, as I have tamales, I remember my brothers and my Mama. All of them were so young and strong on the day we made tamales. And I smile.

My favorite holiday is probably one that most people have never heard of: Sukkot (sukkah, Heb., “Booth/hut”). This seven-day holiday does appear on some Christian calendars as the “Feast of Tabernacles,” which doesn’t provide much by way of explanation, since most of us are not even sure what a tabernacle is. It’s a tent. But THAT doesn’t clarify much, because we’re not actually celebrating tents.

This holiday has its origins in the Five Books of Moses and is at least 3,000 years old. Like most biblical holidays, it has layers of meaning.

At the base is an agricultural celebration. September/ October is the harvest season in the land of Israel and from time immemorial, farmers would erect huts on the edges of their fields where they, their families and their workers would dwell while they did the laborious work of hauling in the harvest. At night they would reward themselves by celebrating, eating and visiting each other amidst their gathered abundance (see the Book of Ruth).

The second level ties the holiday to Jewish sacred history. For 40 years after the Exodus from slavery, we wandered in the wilderness while God took care of us (see the Book of Numbers). So we dwell in our huts as a sacred reenactment of that experience.

The final level regards the sukkah to be a kind of cosmic time machine. During the seven days that we dwell and celebrate, all the Jews of the past join us to rejoice. The prophets also told this that Sukkot would be the time in the Messianic era when all the nations would gather to celebrate in Israel. During those seven days, past, present, and future merge into a holy eternal.

The celebration of this holiday is archaic, tribal and totally fantastic. Our primary obligation is to erect a hut, then at least eat our meals in it, if not actually live in it, for seven days. The hut has specific features, the most striking of which is the roof must be made of natural material (palm branches, bamboo, corn stalks, etc.) but cannot be a complete roof. You must be able to see the stars through your roof. Constructing one’s hut is the muscular Jewish version of decorating a Christmas tree. The sukkah can be kitted out in a very elaborate fashion, including rugs, chairs, beds, lamps, and of course, tables and seats for eating.

It is the ideal to be able to invite “ushpazin,” friends, family, and the needy, as well as the spirits of Jews past, to celebrate together.

The holiday has one other requirement, the arba minim, or Four Species. The Torah commands that we gather together four varieties of plant life: a palm spine, a willow branch, a myrtle branch and an etrog (a kind of lumpy lemon). Intriguingly, the Torah does not tell us what we’re supposed to do with these four objects, so the custom has arisen to turn them into a bouquet. Each day we are supposed to wave this bouquet towards the four cardinal directions, the sky, and the ground. Many explanations have been offered for this extraordinary aboriginal ritual, but the four species are probably intended to be a rainstick, inviting the world to initiate the seasonal rains that, in the land of Israel, should start right around Sukkot.

All in all, this holiday of elaborate ritual camping is a delight. And if you ever have a chance to visit someone with a sukkah, you should definitely take the opportunity.

It was 1948 and the country was beginning to emerge from years of sacrifice that had brought World War II to a conclusion. As the fall days grew shorter, scarcity was still stubbornly hanging on at our house, though as a 6-year-old who had known nothing else, it really didn’t matter. After all, I had parents who loved me, a stinky older brother, and a marvelous angel of a grandmother in residence, as well. Life was very good from my kid point of view.

As the days grew shorter and we moved toward Christmas, my dad, along with the hired man, Willie, and my brother and I, took the horse-drawn sledge to harvest buckets of maple sap from trees we had tapped a few weeks before to take back to the house and cook down on our woodfired kitchen stove to make maple syrup. We also brought back from our outing a pine tree dad cut from our property to serve as our Christmas tree. We adorned it with strings of popcorn and tinsel we had fabricated from the carefully saved strips of metal that had sealed numerous coffee cans over the years before. My mom and grandma brought out treasured glass ornaments for the tree, and a string of lights that would be pressed into use for the first time in my short years, as we had just gotten electricity provided by the REA (Rural Electrification Administration) the summer before.

My mom and dad and grandma, of course, had experience with the wonders of electric lights and such from their past, but it was all new to me. Dad had spent many days in the previous spring wiring the house for electricity in preparation for the blessed arrival of that wonder, thanks to the REA program. The house also began to be filled with the smells of special holiday foods, such as fruitcake, homemade chocolate fudge and toffee that we pulled according to a family recipe from the bakery my grandfather and his brothers had owned before the Great Depression.

As the sparkling fall days grudgingly gave way to ever-earlier darkness, our little family of five would spend pre-Christmas evenings shelling out black walnuts, stubborn to yield their delicious nutmeats in preparation for the holiday baking season. We had a number of the trees growing wild on our farm, so there was an abundance available, and their hulls, bitterly protecting the rock-hard nuts, stained our fingers with their nut brown, acrid fragrance. My brother and I would also take turns beating the chocolate fudge that would receive some of the nutmeats to a sweet, rich smoothness of sugar-saturated delight. I still have the worn wooden spoon we used for that task, so long ago.

Though short on money, we had the abundance from our summer garden, fruit trees, and wild berry bushes canned and put up to enjoy and sustain us through the brisk fall days that hurried us on toward a Christmas that came all too quickly for the adults, and that we kids thought would never come. But come it did, with stockings filled with nuts and oranges and hard, ribbon candy, and gifts of socks and underwear for me and my stinky brother.

Looking back, I am ashamed to think I was disappointed with the utilitarian gifts, for what we did have in plenty was the durable love that lighted the way into an ever-expanding world of people and ideas. I wish for everyone a double share of that love.

John Zeigler was a Presbyterian minister for 53 years. He moved to Denton with his wife, Peggy, in 2011.

I grew up as the youngest of four in a poor but loving family. As a young child, I did not realize we were poor, but I knew I was loved. When I was 8 years old, I started to doubt that Santa Claus was real, until after midnight mass on Christmas Eve, when I was awoken by Santa Claus. I remember being so tired, but once I realized that Santa Claus was in my room and waking me up and no one else, I was wide awake and full of excitement and joy. He put his pointer finger to his lips, telling me to keep quiet before he ran from the room in a blink of my eye.

I bolted out of bed, ran down the hall and followed him out the front door where I swear, I saw him take off in his sled from our front porch! I ran back inside to wake up my parents to tell them that Santa had come and woke me up.

I believed in Santa Claus for two more years. To this day, my father swears that it wasn’t him, but the real Santa.

I look back on this memory every year, knowing that it was my dad giving me a piece of magic, hope, and joy that night. Every year I am reminded of how I felt that Christmas, special, loved and seen.

This is the beauty of holidays, creating lasting memories filled with love that you carry with you throughout your life. Take time to reflect on what this time of year truly means to you and share your memories to keep them alive and fresh in your heart.

Angela Powell is the director of private practice for the Connections Wellness Group in Denton.

During the years my dad served in World War II, my Abuelita (also Nanita), María de Santos Buitrón Galindo, insisted my mom, my younger sister and I move into one of her many houses. We were joined in these shotgun style homes by other members of her large family.

My grandmother’s property was right smack in the middle of a South Texas Mexican-American segregated neighborhood called El Barrio de la Loma Rosa, Spanish namesake for the nearby Rose Hill Cemetery. It was within this tightknit community that I deepened my understanding and appreciation of cultural traditions and values outside the mainstream population.

As one of the youngest of her grandchildren, I still remember my Nanita’s toughness, yet empathetic and caring demeanor as the matriarch of our large Loma Rosa family. She had a powerful presence and uncommon sense of independence. As a single mom and self-made entrepreneur with loads of grit and spunk, Nanita did not allow her lack of formal education or English literacy skills to get in the way of building a simple business operation that provided ample support for her family during the most difficult years of the Depression.

With the help of her adult children, she was able to build a mismatch of small businesses that included small crudely structured unadorned rental homes and a neighborhood store where area residents could purchase bread, milk, eggs and other necessities.

The most joyous and proudest moment I recount every Christmas for my children and grandchildren is La Gran Tamalada. My grandmother would have her sons slaughter one of her hogs in preparation for this grandiose, labor-intensive tamale-making process. My mestizo grandmother with a combined Spanish and Mexican Indian heritage was the lead chef and prime cultural mentor in the production of our favorite Christmas holiday treat.

Making the masa (corn dough) from scratch was probably the most time consuming of the entire operation. The masa was a mix of ground dried corn kernels cooked and soaked in cál (food-grade lime powder) with pork fat and water added to moisten the dough. The damp masa was important to ensure an even spread of the dough on the corn husk before the grounded pork meat was encased in the tamale.

The final step usually on Christmas Eve was the actual assembling of each tamale by family members gathered around my grandmother’s large kitchen table.

On Christmas morning, the process was finally complete with enough tamales steam cooked in deep aluminum pots to go around for Nanita’s family and barrio friends to enjoy during the Christmas holiday.

My Nanita passed away peacefully on July 26, 1949. I consider it a blessing she was part of my life even if it was for a short while. It is said that a beautiful and caring soul is never forgotten. My wonderful wife with her own indomitable spirit and deep love for la familia decided soon after the birth of our first grandchild to be called Nanita by her grandchildren. This was her way of honoring my grandmother and, in this manner, passing on to future generations of our family the memory of my amazing Abuelita, Doña (Mrs.) María de Santos Buitrón Galindo.

Rudy Rodríguez is a retired faculty member at the University of North Texas. He also was in the teacher education faculty of Texas Woman’s University and a former member of the Denton ISD board of trustees.

As a boy, the climax of my Christmas experience was centered around Santa’s visit and the presents that he would bring. In my anticipation, Christmas was an opportunity to learn delayed gratification -- doing something now for the sake of a future benefit. Christmas thus taught me something about patience.

It is a lesson that I have not learned well. I do not wait well. I am not a good wait-er; I tend to avoid situations in which I must wait. Nor am I alone. It is easy in our world today to be infected by a sense of impatience. “Wasting” time is one of the cardinal sins of our society today, and nothing seems more wasteful to us than waiting.

For most of us, waiting is no more than a momentary inconvenience, and times in which we must wait are like speedbumps in our lives.

I think, for example, of the kind of waiting that takes place in hospital waiting rooms. Or on job search sites. Or internet dating sites. Or in fertility clinics. Or in prison. Advent, the season before Christmas, is about waiting for God. Advent reminds us that in the midst of a busy world where we hate to wait, God nevertheless calls us to wait with -- with the sick, with the unemployed, with the lonely, with those struggling to conceive, with prisoners.

God calls us to wait with not merely because it is a nice thing to do, but because God uses waiting to teach us the valuable lesson of our own relative powerlessness.

On some level, waiting for recovery, employment, a child, or whatever -- all profound experiences of waiting -- are experiences of waiting for God. And the paradox of this Advent season, is that God is most present with those who wait for God, with the sick and the homeless and the lonely and the oppressed and the lowly.

Wait for God this Advent season. Wait together with others. The promise is that you will find that the waiting is mutual, that God is waiting for you, too.

Having a child has made me more aware of the flesh. My daughter, Anna, likes to play with me and often wants me to chase after her, tickle her, or hold her up by her ankles and swing her around. I do it, of course, sometimes even when she doesn’t ask, just because.

And then there are the times when I hold her -- after she has hurt herself, or when she isn’t feeling well. I used to hold her and read to her when I put her to bed, but now she wants to go to bed without being held. I miss it.

Becoming a father, playing with Anna day after day, has made me more aware that the first language of love is the language of the flesh. Newborn babies need to be held far more than they need to be told “I love you.” Studies have shown that the touch of a loved one, hand held in hand, flesh pressed against flesh, makes pain more endurable.

Christmas for Christians is the celebration of the mystery that the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, the mystery of a love and of a God that is at once cosmic and universal and powerful, but also, at the very same time, as revealed in Christ, particular and intimate and vulnerable.

At a time when we live more and more of our lives disembodied, in the cloud, through a screen, we need to hear the Christmas story again, with its affirmation that love is about bodies.

Christmas is about God making a home in the body. It is a bold act on God’s part. Because as we all know, to become flesh is to become vulnerable. It is a bold act on God’s part, but love demands nothing less, especially a love this deep, and God wouldn’t have it any other way.

As a grandmother of 20, Christmas holds the most precious memories and it all begins with my Christmas village and stockings. I have a miniature village that takes a whole day to put up and it is the envy of everyone who enters my home during the holidays. The village is called Charlottesville.

The first year my husband and I were married, my motherin- law gave me three pieces: a church and two houses. Over the years, other family members have added to the collection and now over 100 pieces to the village stand. There is a post office, Irish pub, tailor shop, gas station, Mexican restaurant, greenhouse florist, insurance agency, bakery, hotel, a train station, toy store, church, nativity scene and much more.

The village comes to life with people, cats, dogs, foxes, deer, rabbits and even a few ducks on a pond, all adding to the magical village. One year we even had a train traveling through a hill and around the countryside, ending up at the train depot in the town of Charlottesville.

Just thinking of my village makes me want to leave it up all year long. But for now, it goes up the day after Thanksgiving and it does not come down until sometime in February, around Valentine’s Day. As I have gotten older and the job of setting up the Charlottesville Christmas village seems harder, the daylong project has been taken over by my granddaughter, Ashton. I just supervise and feed her a MeMom cooked meal.

Around the bottom of the village platform hangs 28 stockings for every member of the family, and yes, each gets filled with goodies. Christmas is my favorite time of the year and I treasure the memories.

Charlotte Canion and her husband, Crague, are 20-year residents of Denton. She is an actress, author and public speaker.

Texans old and new tend to greet fall with greater joy than many others around the nation. After the summers we have down here, the cooler temperatures are viewed as a gift from God. I’ve always loved a change in seasons -- an amazing aspect of God’s design of the planet. “As long as the earth endures, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night will never cease.” (Genesis 8:22)

Anselm of Canterbury, the great 12th-century philosopher, described the planet’s design this way. Imagine you’ve never seen a pocket watch and one day you stumble upon one. You look at the gold, read the inscription, see the crystal face and moving hands. You open the back and see all of the gears and springs. The first and most natural conclusion is that if there is a watch, there must be a watchmaker. It didn’t just happen. It was created.

And in November we celebrate one of those great aspects of God’s creation: harvest. That word has sort of a double meaning in the Scriptures. On the one hand, “harvest” describes the natural, seasonal production of the land. Harvest is partly divine providence.

Just ask those first pilgrims who survived the first Plymouth winter. To a person they were grateful for God’s providence and provision.

But “harvest” also describes human effort. Solomon reminds us: “A sluggard does not plow in season; so at harvest time he looks but finds nothing.” (Proverbs 20:4) Harvest and work are intricately related.

Again, ask those pilgrims. After barely surviving the first winter, they knew better what to expect -- and spent a whole year preparing for the next one. When the second winter came, they were ready.

So, this Thanksgiving, let’s commit to have a true harvest celebration. Let us thank God for his providence in our lives and families, for our wonderful nation, and for our dear friends. But let us also take a moment to think about the harvest of our lives. What are we producing? None of us want to get to the “ultimate harvest” and look, but find nothing.

Born and reared in Denton, Dr. Jim Mann founded New Life Church in the north Denton/Sanger area. Jim and his wife, Christine, have been married since 1992, and have two adult children and a daughter-in-law.