CHRISTMAS, 1963

We were living on Vattier Street in Manhattan, Kansas. It was my second Christmas away from my family. The year before, I had problems recovering from giving birth and almost died, so there wasn’t much thought given to a holiday.

This year would be different. I was robustly healthy, as was my daughter, Melanie, now a year and a few weeks old.

Around the middle of December, I asked my husband to stop so we could get a little Christmas tree to decorate.

He said we should wait until closer to the 25th, when the prices would go down. That wasn’t unreasonable, because he was in the Army, and with our allotment for one child, our monthly income was one-hundred, twenty-three dollars. That’s right, that’s what we were expected to live on for a whole month. Our rent was sixty dollars. I supplemented that by sewing for the other soldiers, and if he saw an empty pop bottle lying by the side of the road, he stopped to get it. After all, three cents was three cents.

We shopped at the commissary and the PX where things were cheaper than the regular stores and did what we could to save money.

On December twentieth, I said, “We ought to get a tree.”

“Wait another day or two.”

By Christmas Eve, we still didn’t have a tree, and I was upset. After dinner, where I’d nagged him some more, he said, “Okay! I’ll go get us a Christmas tree.”

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So off he went.

It was two hours before he came home with a tree about three feet tall and half-naked branches.

“How much did that cost?” I asked.

“It was the last one. The guy gave it to me.”

We didn’t have a tree stand, so he put it in an empty waste paper basket and stuffed a pair of pants around the base to make it stand up.

Of course, we didn’t have money for ornaments. I cut up pieces of ribbons from my sewing box and made little bows. It was enough.

I was healthy, my baby was healthy, and we had a tree, our very first.

It was Christmas enough.