Christmases

When you look back over the years, what Christmases hop out of your memory bank? It’s too cold to stand out by the back fence today. Come on over and join me for a cup of tea in my cozy kitchen, and we’ll talk about memorable Christmases.

We were in the state of Chiapas, Mexico, near the Guatemalan border, when Christmas overtook us in 1952. A group of missionary trainees had gathered at Wycliffe’s Jungle Camp to learn how to survive in the jungle and to meet another culture. With our two children, ages one and three, Ed and I had the distinction of being the biggest family among the trainees.

The most imposing building in our “village” was a wood-frame dining hall/kitchen. The mud huts with their thatched roofs seemed more at home in the cultural setting. Jungle camp nestled on a grassy plain near wooded hills. Tzeltal Indian villages were tucked away in the woods only a short hike from camp. I suppose the two outhouses, His and Hers, were a curiosity to our Tzeltal neighbors. We, that is the camp, had our own private airstrip. Our bath house was a river running along one edge of camp. The furnishings in our mud hut consisted of a few rough shelves to store our personal belongings and four wooden frames on which we put our air mattresses and sleeping bags. We ate in the group dinning hall and took our turn on cooking and cleanup crews. The camp had a generator which ran a little while each evening to power lights in the dining hall and pump water into an elevated tank to provide running water in the kitchen. We paid a Tzeltal woman a few pesos to do our laundry. She beat our clothes out on the rocks at the river. I can still see her little daughter as she carried the wet clothes up from the river in a wooden bowl balanced on her head.

When we first arrived, one-year-old Danny was not yet steady on his feet. It took only a few tumbles before he walked with confidence over the rough trails around camp. Three-year-old Jean soon found friends among the children of staff members.

At Christmas time we drew names for a gift exchange. There wasn’t a Wal-Mart nearby so we had to use our ingenuity to come up with a gift. I made a planter in our woodworking class. Near the edge of the jungle, I found a fern-like plant to put in it.

The owner of a nearby hacienda hosted the big social event of the season. He invited our entire group of Jungle Campers to his home for a Christmas party. I carried one-year-old Danny tied to my back with a rebozo as our group trooped across the pasto (pasture) that lay between our camp and his imposing ranch house. The luxury of this home stood in sharp contrast to the squalor of the Tzeltal Indian villages we visited on our weekly hikes. Jungle Camp staff members conversed freely in Spanish with our hospitable host and hostess. The rest of us practiced the few polite Spanish phrases we had learned and enjoyed Mexican Christmas delicacies. That was a Christmas that will always stand out in my memory.