Free A Simple Christmas by Mike Huckabee Page B

strange kind of way, it wouldn’t be Christmas without the obligatory connection with family members—even the ones we barely know. These are the people to whom we are genetically linked. We can look at our older relatives and get a glimpse of how we might look someday ( yikes! ), and when we look at the younger ones, we might remember how we once looked. But beyond physical appearances and behavioral traits, there is that reassuring reminder that we are in fact a part of an ongoing chain of human life—there is continuity in our existence, and continuity means purpose, and if we have a purpose, then surely that’s an affirmation that we were created by something larger than ourselves and aren’t mere products of chance and accident. (Although I’m sure that some of my relatives must have looked at me and thought God did have a great sense of humor!)
    Enough of my deep thoughts on the nature and role of families. Let’s face it, at Christmas, even if we believe in creation, we might become convinced that we’re all devolving.
    My family has given me lots of material for several books, but since a bunch of them are still living, I can’t tell all the stories I have. Instead, I will have to limit the Christmas memories to those that won’t get me sued or, worse, beaten to a pulp by more violent members of my bloodline.
    On my mother’s side of the family, the Elders, Christmas was complicated because my mother was one of seven children. This meant that whatever we did, it was going to be crowded. One of her brothers, Neal Elder, died before I was even born, and it was tragic. He drowned the day before his wedding. He was second in age to my mother, and they were close, so his death was one she never really got over. It also meant that she was terrified of our drowning. But even with Uncle Neal gone, that still left six siblings, and after they all married and had kids, whoever’s house we went to for Christmas was going to be filled beyond capacity. None of my mother’s family had large homes, but I don’t think we ever even thought about that then. I do remember that almost all of the adults smoked. This was in the 1950s and early ’60s, when it would’ve been unthinkable to suggest that blowing toxic carcinogens into the faces of children might be dangerous and maybe they should smoke outdoors. It didn’t help that I was allergic to smoke (though we didn’t know that then); any complaint that I couldn’t breathe was met with a dismissive “Boy, quit your whining and acting up like that.” It’s a darn good thing no one had smoke alarms back then—they never would have stopped ringing.
    In addition to celebrating the Elder family Christmas party in a room more crowded than the mosh pit at a Whitesnake concert and more smoke filled than the inside of a California wildfire, I had to put up with adults doing embarrassingly strange things either to get or to avoid attention. Looking back, I don’t think anyone was normal.
    First there was my grandmother, Eva Whitney Elder Garner. She was born a Whitney, married and widowed by an Elder, and married and abandoned or divorced (we’re not sure which) by a Garner. The thing that distinguished my maternal grandmother was the fact that she had lost one eye as a young woman, supposedly by looking at the sun. She never bothered to get a glass eye or anything cosmetic such as a simple patch—she just had one good eye and one that just wasn’t there. Her appearance scared little kids at first sight, but we were all used to it. The only thing more pronounced about her than her eye was her voice. It was loud. My cousin Sandy had dubbed her Go-Go, which stuck, because he said all she did was “go, go, go.” So that’s we called our grandma. Not “Grandma,” “Granny,” “Big Mama,” or anything remotely normal for a grandparent. She was