I am in throes of moving and wanted to get this Christmas story off to MyRetrospect. If you like it, I hope you’ll save it for December. I will search for a photo, but right now, chaos reigns.

"I could remember beautiful kimonos and dolls and lacquered chopsticks and little girl’s tea sets that had come my way from the earlier war when Daddy was occupying Japan. But this Korean War was very disappointing."

Louise Farmer Smith

[Sent to Retrospect October 27th]

CHRISTMAS 1951

For Christmas gifts in 1951, my little sister and I each received a very heavy, poorly-wrapped present from Daddy. We just stared at the pieces of unfamiliar equipment inside, and I figured this was the last straw. My mother was too sick to make a Christmas breakfast in our little bungalow in Norman, Oklahoma. My little sister, Phoebe, age 7, was also sick and shockingly thin. My little brother Larry was three, too young to understand the heavy atmosphere around our Christmas tree, but he was quieter than usual. The worst part was that my father was overseas in Korea, and we hadn’t had a letter in awhile. I was eleven and believed I was responsible for making everyone happy. But this Christmas I was overwhelmed.

Mother had a policy of not crying in front of the children, so I had never developed much sympathy for her as a woman separated from her husband. Oblivious to the passion between them, I figured she hardly missed him.

Christmas morning she dragged herself out of her sick bed and came to lie on the couch to watch her children open their presents. I could see her wince when she tried to raise her head, and every time I looked at her, she made an unconvincing smile.

Mother said our Christmas presents from Daddy were generators to be somehow attached to the rear wheels of our bicycles and lamps to go on the handle-bars. Okay. That could be fun. Phoebe and I ran out to the garage in our pajamas to set them up immediately. Mother ran out and carried my little sister back inside. I figured I’d get our bikes all set up with these things and surprise Phoebe, but the directions were in Korean. I struggled until I was in tears, and Mother, leaning out the back door, pled with me to come in before I caught my death.

Was this all we were getting from Daddy for Christmas? I could remember beautiful kimonos and dolls and lacquered chopsticks and little girl’s tea sets that had come my way from the earlier war when Daddy was occupying Japan. But this Korean War was very disappointing. Anything else we received that year for Christmas, has been forgotten.

Now, an adult, I see that war on MASH reruns and imagine my father there. How did he come by those bike-light generators? There were no shops. Did the army supply those? It would have been like him to barter for them, maybe with a Korean. Although Daddy never got to Tokyo where the 4077 doctors fled for R and R, he wouldn’t have given up until he found something. He, who had designed streetlights for a living, must have been over the moon to find those bike lights.

It was Granddad, my mother’s father who figured out how to install the bike lights, and if Phoebe and I had been soldiers we might have been able to pump hard enough to generate more than a match flicker of light. But we liked the idea of having bike lights that needed no batteries and showed them off to our friends

Daddy came home eventually, and my mother and her sister drove all the way to California to meet their husband’s troop ship. When I think of my mother there on the pier in San Diego, watching that enormous boat slowly dock, and seeing a banner Daddy and his brother-in-law unfurled over the railing, saying how glad they were that the wives had come, I get tears in my eyes. My parents, working together over a life-time marriage produced many creative, generous Christmases with gifts other parents never thought of—a jockey cycle that all the parents wanted to ride, dolls with real hair cut from our own heads and sent to a Kansas City wig-maker.

Now, living on the east coast, I still watch a lot of MASH reruns which are so often about family, General Potter or BJ’s wives or Hawkeye’s father up in Maine. And Korean families too, in desperate need of some exception to U.S. Army regulations to be made from one human to another with Hawkeye’s intervention. And I think lovingly of my father in that hilly, barren war zone searching for gifts for his children.

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smithlouise
My little brother was a baby boomer, one of the first things my father took care of when he returned from Japan. I'm prewar, a writer with more recollections than I can ever pass on. My first book, ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF MARRIAGE, was 100% fiction, I thought. But time has proven it was greatly influenced by memory. CADILLAC, OKLAHOMA is fiction. And THE WOMAN WITHOUT A VOICE is just the facts.

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