Each time I turn a lamp off, I think of the man who raised me.

Daddy always promised Mama he would replace the worn brown carpet in the living room. He would sip his coffee out of one of Mama’s ceramic Santa mugs and say, “From that room in yonder all the way down the hall and into the bedrooms in any color you want. Not the cheap kind either, but extra plush. Your feet will just bog down into it.”

He would sometimes get an extra kiss on those nights with a bigger than usual slice of pecan pie as the two of them sat elbow to elbow at the yellow Formica bar in the kitchen.

Of course, the carpet didn’t come that year. That money went for something else more pressing: maybe Tony’s extra root canals, new tires for the family Oldsmobile, or back-to-school clothes.

We made the best of it, though, moving the furniture from one side of the room to the other, throwing rugs over worn patches. Christmas was our favorite time of year because we could put colored lights all over the mantle, the artificial tree, and just about everything that held still. We discovered that a little bit of Christmas was just what we needed at that very minute most of the Decembers of my childhood.

Mama never threw anything away, so several decades of decorating meant an attic full of green garlands, tangled lights, plastic trees, ornaments wrapped in newspapers, and anything that lit up from angels to toy soldiers. We would spend days covering everything in our house with fake snow, mice figurines from “The Night before Christmas,” silver tinsel, and bows in every color of the rainbow. Each year we added more — more red poinsettias in recycled flower pots, more wreaths on the windows, more animated Santas scattered here to there, more magic.

My daddy was a truck driver most of his life. Mama was a stay-at-home mother of four rowdy boys and Nanny to many grandchildren. I often sneaked into the kitchen behind Daddy to get a piece of homemade divinity only to see him scratching on his yellow legal pads, sipping coffee and wondering how he was going to pay the mortgage, afford my college tuition, or give Mama those new blue carpets for Christmas. I would give him a hug. He would grab his ashtray and head off to bed, but not before shouting, “Turn off these lights. It costs a fortune.”

He finally got Mama those new carpets a few years before she passed away. He followed six months after her of a broken heart, but that’s not where the story ends. The memories of hard times made better with holiday cheer linger. His first grandchild will give birth in a few days to his fourth great-granddaughter, proving that life goes on.

Wherever we are spread apart by time, we will all gather around our blinking Christmas lights remembering that the past is indeed the present and how lucky we were.
David Creel is a Mississippi native and a syndicated columnist. You may reach him at beautifulwithdavid@gmail.com.