Having spent the last few columns discussing local Christmas customs, I’m going to work one more in before the season’s over. Betsy says I’ve already written this’un for my papers, but I think she’s remembering it from when I wrote it two decades ago for “Mississippi Magazine.” So, if you’ve read it before, skip on over to the funny pages.

Back after New Year’s of 1978, we were cleaning out the old Brownspur Commissary Store after moving it behind the house, to make it into a two-bed, two-bath guesthouse. The old native cypress building had been built to replace The Store which had washed away in the 1927 flood, so it was 50 years old itself and the storekeepers had never thrown away anything. There was so much Brownspur history here that I was determined to go through each piece of paper before throwing anything away.

I had almost finished reading everything in the old office part, and was beginning to start cleaning. To that end, I pulled the old Post Office pigeonhole shelves away from the wall.

There was a tattered package behind it that had fallen back there 30 years before. The brown paper still legibly held the address “M/M Hurbert Hartmann, Frankfurt, Germany,” in Miz Janice’s handwriting.

When I was just a baby, during and after World War II, there was a German POW camp down at Burdette. Big Robert used to pick up the same crew daily to work on Brownspur. We still have furniture carved by some of those men: Joe the Nazi, “Villie,” Monfred, and the one they called “Johnny the German,” whose real name was Hurbert Hartmann. He and Big Robert got so close that my sire was named godfather to little Krystal Hartmann, born the year after the war ended and the POWs were sent home to rebuild. When I graduated from Leland High, I got a gift from my godsister Krystal, and well-wishes from her parents.

Whose were the addressees for the mouse-gnawed package I had found behind the pigeonholes?

The postmark was from December 1948. Stained with mouse urine and droppings were the remains of a hand-crocheted christening gown for Krystal and a silk scarf for her mother. What the mice had left of several boxes of dried milk was mainly just the box label, but there was a glass baby bottle filled with rubber nipples and capped with a hard plastic cap that looked new, as did a can of pipe tobacco for Johnny the German. The accompanying letter was mostly illegible, but I could see snatches of both Daddy’s and Mother’s handwriting on it.

Although this particular package had never made it to Germany, I could recall a regular exchange of letters and Christmas gifts between Brownspur and Frankfurt, at least until Betsy and I got married and I left home. It had obviously made no difference in the two families’ friendship that the package I now held had never made it to the Hartmann’s.

What must it have been like for those men, mostly captured from the submarine pens at Brest, to have endured those couple of years of the war safe here in Mississippi, knowing their homes and families were being bombed?

Mother always had a hot breakfast for those men, and every Brownspur adult during those times told me again and again how the POWs couldn’t keep from fondly patting my headful of blonde curls.

I wished Merry Christmas to the Hartmann family and my godsister Krystal, 30 years too late. Although finding that package made it not too late, didn’t it?

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Robert Hitt Neill is an outdoors writer. He lives in Leland, Miss.