A Miracle Under the Christmas Tree

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“I’m going to deliver teas now,” I said to Mamie, the eldest Dickens daughter and our director. “I’ll be back before opening.”

“You okay, honey?” she asked concerned. “You look done.”

“Stick a fork in me,” I replied. “I’m just glad it’s the last day of the season.”

In truth, I was exhausted. There are some things which, even though you love to do them, can take a lot of effort. Working at the Dickens Fair was a lot of work, plus I had a full-time job on the weekdays. Also, it can be a very expensive hobby. This was the first year I worked at the Fair. I had only attended once before as a patron, watching Daniel perform in one of the stage shows.

I have always loved the fantasy of time travel and have been an avid reader of historical novels for years. I had such a great time as a patron that I decided to join in, jumping into the deep end feet first. I could be, if only for a short time, somewhere and someone else, to live the fantasy. I could have asked to do something simpler to start, but I have a hard time asking for help, especially when it involves doing something I say I like doing.

I walked out of the Parlour, near the entrance to the Fair, past the stalls and storefronts of the artisans who sell their wares of Christmas decorations, bonnets and wreaths, pewter goblets and jewelry. I headed into the breezeway, home of the London docks and the Paddy West School of Seamanship, which is in reality a band of very musical sailors who sing sea chanteys and nautical songs. I dropped off one air pot of tea, received a hug of thanks from one of the cabin “boys”(a lively woman with short hair) and headed down to Mad Sal’s Dockside Alehouse at the other end of the bay to drop off the rest. Mad Sal’s is where naughty music hall songs are performed and represents the seedy end of our London.

The rain was really coming down, booming and loud against the roof, the occasional thunderclap joining in for good measure. Heading backstage, I dropped off the last air pots to Weasel, our chief chucker in the Music Hall. Short in stature but big in heart, he can get you to sing along with a music hall ditty faster than you can say “Burlington Bertie from Bow.”

“Oy! Weasel!” I said, in my best Cockney accent. “Where’s Sal an’ everybody?”

“Over by the door,” he replied, gesturing with his thumb. “I’m stayin’ in ’ere. Too bleedin’ cold for me near the door.”

“Too right,” I said, nodding at the air pots. “I’ll pick ’em up afore the last show.”

I turned away from the stage and headed back to the Parlour along the sidewall of the Concourse. I saw Mad Sal, Dr. Boddy, Molly Twitch, Polly Amory and a few others sitting and watching the rain. I gave a quick wave and continued walking.

“Gee,” I heard someone say, “you think all this rain might affect attendance?”

Suddenly, there was another loud thunderclap, and POP all the lights went out! The few exit lights in the building came on immediately after.

“That might,” came the reply.

We will not be opening the Fair on time today, I realized. The entire hall felt nearly pitch-black at first, with the exception of the exit signs. We wouldn’t be able to bring customers in until we could get the lights back on. I slowly made my way back to the Parlour, taking my time and stepping carefully, overhearing pieces of conversations as I went.

“Somebody forgot to pay the electric bill!”

At an ale stand: “I guess we have to drink all the champagne before it gets warm.”

Someone talking to the dancing light of a cell phone screen: “What’s that, Tink? The pirates have captured Wendy?”

I came back into the Paddy West area to see the whole group sitting on the stage, playing softly in the semidarkness. The side exit doors had been opened a crack to let in some light. I didn’t want to move another step back into the darkness of the next bay, so I sat down on one of the benches facing the stage.

They started to play my favorite sea chanty, “Rolling Home.” The beauty of the music, my fatigue, the dark and the rain all came together and washed over me. I started to cry. Then I started to think.

Do I really want to do this, year after year? “Rolling home, rolling home.” I am so wiped out, and it’s such a huge commitment. “Rolling home across the sea.” Is this something that Daniel and I should share? “Rolling home to dear old England.” What if we have kids? Will we bring them, too? “Rolling home, fair land to thee.”

Our minutes in the dark stretched on past 11 a.m., our opening time. I returned to the Parlour at about 10:45. Daniel and I began to take the small, unlit candles off our Christmas tree, light them and set them in candelabras on the dining table. It gave a beautiful glow to our set, now a very realistic looking Victorian parlor.

We sat down at the settee, and I told him about my little breakdown in the Paddy West area. He held my hand and said, “Okay, today is our last day.”

“Yeah,” I said, “until next year.”

“No,” he said, “our last day ever. I don’t want you to do anything that doesn’t make you happy. And I definitely won’t make you do something that is supposed to be just for fun when you hate it.”

It didn’t sound right to me the minute he said it. I love doing this, I thought. I love creating the type of Christmas that probably never existed, but we all wish could have. I love the friends I’ve made here. They’ve become my family.

“I love you,” I said finally. “I love that you would be okay with my quitting. But I’m not going to. I found my people, where I belong. I may do things a little different next year to make it easier, but I won’t give it up. There would be too many things I would miss and too much.”

Daniel smiled at me in a way that told me he had known I would change my mind, cheeky bugger. Before we met, I wrote down all the things I wanted in a guy. One of them was “someone who would call me on my nonsense.” Damn if I didn’t find him.

A call went out to the cast members inside to gather together all the umbrellas in the building; the line of customers had extended past the building well into the parking lot for several yards. Charles Dickens and other cast members went out to hold the umbrellas and keep everyone as dry as possible. All the musicians available entertained them. The servers from Cuthbert’s Tea Shoppe came out, too, dispensing hot tea.

Some people were escorted in small groups past the Parlour to the restrooms. Walking past, one woman gave a small gasp. “Oh!” she said, turning toward the Parlour and seeing our candlelit set, “You all look like a painting!”

By 11:30, I was providing the last of our tea supply to Cuthbert’s when the lights came back on. We could hear the cheer from the crowd outside as plain as if they were standing next to us. As soon as it was safe to do so, the doors were opened to let the patrons into the Fair.

The abbreviated schedule didn’t seem to diminish the experience of the day for anyone. The spirit of Christmas, it seemed, was present everywhere. Everyone was happy and smiling, patron and participant alike. The small kindnesses that our cast and crew gave to those outside was repaid tenfold back to us, in every heartfelt “Merry Christmas” and word of thanks. Patrons who had originally planned to spend only an hour or two at our fair told me they were going to stay all day, just to support us!

“Thank you for bringing the Dickens Fair outside!” one woman exclaimed.

That was my first year working at the Great Dickens Christmas Fair. Did I go back? Yes, and with a renewed enthusiasm. Last year, we brought our four-year-old for his first year as a participant. Daniel built a train for him out of cardboard boxes so he could be part of the Toy Parade. Bringing a baby or a small child to the Fair as a participant takes a considerable amount of careful planning, but it can be done. Those who are the most successful are those who ask for help. The Fair’s community, like any large family, takes care of its own.

Will our son share our passion for this and join us even when he is older? It’s hard to say at this point, but he will be raised knowing how much we love it and hearing stories of the Fairs of Christmas Past. And I am sure we will tell him about the day the Fair went dark.

Looking back, the best part of that day for me was seeing the quality of people in our Fair family. Some say we are crazy to spend our time, our money and our holiday season on this theatrical enterprise. But now I can’t imagine a better way to spend my Decembers than with this group I am proud to work with and proud to know.

FINDING JOY IN THE WORLD

ELAINE AMBROSE

December 1980 arrived in a gray cloud of disappointment as I became the involuntary star in my own soap opera, a hapless heroine who faced the camera at the end of each day and asked, “Why?” as the scene faded to black. Short of being tied to a rail-road track in the path of an oncoming train, I found myself in an equally dire situation, wondering how my life turned into such a calamity of sorry events. I was unemployed and had a two-year-old daughter, a six-week-old son, an unemployed husband who left the state looking for work and a broken furnace with no money to fix it. To compound the issues, I lived in the same small Idaho town as my wealthy parents, and they refused to help. This scenario was more like The Grapes of Wrath than The Sound of Music.

After getting the children to bed, I would sit alone in my rocking chair and wonder what went wrong. I thought I had followed the correct path by getting a college degree before marriage and then working four years before having children. My plan was to stay home with two children for five years and then return to a satisfying, lucrative career. But, no, suddenly I was poor and didn’t have money to feed the kids or buy them Christmas presents. I didn’t even have enough money for a cheap bottle of wine. At least I was breast-feeding the baby, so that cut down on grocery bills. And my daughter thought macaroni and cheese was what everyone had every night for dinner. Sometimes I would add a wiggly gelatin concoction, and she would squeal with delight. Toddlers don’t know or care if Mommy earned Phi Beta Kappa scholastic honors in college. They just want to squish Jell-O through their teeth.

The course of events that led to that December unfolded like a fateful temptation. I was twenty-six years old in 1978 and energetically working as an assistant director for the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. My husband had a professional job in an advertising agency, and we owned a modest but new home. After our daughter was born, we decided to move to my hometown of Wendell, Idaho, population 1,200, to help my father with his businesses. He owned about thirty thousand acres of land, one thousand head of cattle and more than fifty 18-wheel diesel trucks. He had earned his vast fortune on his own, and his philosophy of life was to work hard and die, a goal he achieved at the young age of sixty.

In hindsight, by moving back home, I was probably trying to establish the warm relationship with my father that I had always wanted. I should have known better. My father was not into relationships, and even though he was incredibly successful in business, life at home was painfully cold. His home, inspired by the designs of Frank Lloyd Wright, was his castle. The semi-circular structure was built of rock and cement and perched on a hill overlooking rolling acres of crops. My father controlled the furnishings and artwork. Just inside the front door hung a huge metal shield adorned with sharp swords. An Indian buckskin shield and arrows were on another wall. In the corner, a fierce wooden warrior held a long spear, ever ready to strike. A metal breastplate hung over the fireplace, and four wooden, naked aborigine busts perched on the stereo cabinet. The floors were polished cement, and the bathrooms had purple toilets. I grew up thinking this decor was normal.

I remember the first time I entered my friend’s home and gasped out loud at the sight of matching furniture, floral wallpaper, delicate vases full of fresh flowers and walls plastered with family photographs, pastoral scenes and framed Norman Rockwell prints. On the rare occasions that I was allowed to sleep over at a friend’s house, I couldn’t believe that the family woke up calmly and gathered together to have a pleasant breakfast. At my childhood home, my father would put on John Philip Sousa march records at 6:00 a.m., turn up the volume and go up and down the hallway knocking on our bedroom doors calling, “Hustle. Hustle. Get up! Time is money!” Then my brothers and I would hurry out of bed, pull on work clothes and get outside to do our assigned farm chores. As I moved sprinkler pipe or hoed beets or pulled weeds in the potato fields, I often reflected on my friends who were gathered at their breakfast tables, smiling over plates of pancakes and bacon. I knew at a young age that my home life was not normal.

After moving back to the village of Wendell, life went from an adventure to tolerable and then tumbled into a scene out of On the Waterfront. As I watched my career hopes fade away under the stressful burden of survival, I often thought of my single, childless friends who were blazing trails and breaking glass ceilings as women earned better professional jobs. Adopting my favorite Marlon Brando accent, I would raise my fists and declare, “I coulda been a contender! I coulda been somebody, instead of a bum, which is what I am.”

There were momentary lapses in sanity when I wondered if I should have been more like my mother. I grew up watching her dutifully scurry around as she desperately tried to serve and obey. My father demanded a hot dinner on the table every night, even though the time he would come home could vary by as much as three hours. My mother would add milk to the gravy, cover the meat with tin foil (which she later washed and reused) and admonish her children to be patient. “Your father works so hard,” she would say. “We will wait for him.” I opted not to emulate most of her habits. She fit the role of her time, and I still admire her goodness.

My husband worked for my father, and we lived out in the country in one of my father’s houses. One afternoon in August of 1980, they got into a verbal fight, and my dad fired my husband. I was pregnant with our second child. We were instructed to move, so we found a tiny house in town, and then my husband left to look for work because jobs weren’t all that plentiful in Wendell. Our son was born in October, weighing in at a healthy eleven pounds. The next month, we scraped together enough money to buy a turkey breast for Thanksgiving. By December, our meager savings were gone, and we had no income.

I was determined to celebrate Christmas. We found a scraggly tree and decorated it with handmade ornaments. My daughter and I made cookies and sang songs. I copied photographs of the kids in their pajamas and made calendars as gifts. This was before personal computers, so I drew the calendar pages, stapled them to cardboard covered with fabric and glued red rickrack around the edges. It was all I had to give to those on my short gift list.

Just as my personal soap opera was about to be renewed for another season, my life started to change. One afternoon, about a week before Christmas, I received a call from one of my father’s employees. He was “in the neighborhood” and heard that my furnace was broken. He fixed it for free and wished me a merry Christmas. I handed him a calendar, and he pretended to be overjoyed. The next day, the mother of a childhood friend arrived at my door with two of her chickens, plucked and packaged. She said they had extras to give away. Again, I humbly handed her a calendar. More little miracles occurred. A friend brought a box of baby clothes that her boy had outgrown and teased me about my infant son wearing his sister’s hand-me-down, pink pajamas. Then, another friend of my mother’s arrived with wrapped toys to put under the tree. The doorbell continued to ring, and I received casseroles, offers to babysit, more presents and a bouquet of fresh flowers. I ran out of calendars to give in return.