Christmas wasn’t quite the same that first year after grandma died. Oh, it was still Christmas in a lot of ways. The tree was there, decorated with many of the same ornaments as last year. Brightly adorned presents abounded and we kids eagerly waited, as usual, to strip them of their shiny wrappings. It didn’t even seem to matter that we couldn’t be at Grandma’s house this year. But, in my 10-year-old mind, something was amiss.
It was the village—corrugated cottages amid fluffy cotton snow. The village had always been there. It was the first sign of the holiday season. Even before the tree was set up and decorated, the village was all in place.
Each year Grandma took those same cardboard cottage sand shops, wooden trees, and celluloid snowmen and reindeer from that old shoebox and transformed them with the magic of her aging hands into a village. That village was real. It was real in my mind and the minds of all her grandchildren. And, I suspect, it was real in her mind as well.
Each piece was set in place with such care. The reindeer always gathered near the small mirror pond as Santa paused on the slope above the church ready to ski into town. The evergreens surrounding the shops and homes grew taller each year—well, at least it seemed they did.
The village was there that eleventh Christmas. The trees were there, although I’m sure they hadn’t grown. The cottages, shops, and church were there too, but they seemed somehow more crowded together. The reindeer gathered around a pond that had been mysteriously transported to the other end of town, and Santa would have completely missed the village had he descended that slope.
Then it struck me. It wasn’t the village that had been important after all. The cardboard cottages and reindeer were mere trappings. It was only what Grandma put into that village that mattered. I’m sure that somewhere Grandma smiled that Christmas, for she must have realized that over the years she had given me—and all her grandchildren—a gift far more precious than any of those waiting under the tree. She had given us a bit of herself.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chuck Robinson is the co-founder and former co-owner, with his wife Dee, of Village Books and Paper Dreams in Fairhaven and Lynden. He has served on numerous local, regional, and national nonprofit boards and consulted with small businesses and nonprofits. Chuck and Dee, now retired, travel widely and spend time reading, attending plays, concerts, and other cultural events. When not engaging in those activities Chuck plays pickleball and rides his bike. He has contributed chapters to several book industry publications and is the author of “It Takes a Village Books: Building Community One Book at a Time.” Chuck grew up in a small Midwestern town and now he and Dee live in Lynden with their Cockapoo, Dickens.
