Erin Napier’s Christmas Memories

Some people consider my husband, Ben, and me a Christmas couple. I like that. Not just because it’s my favorite holiday and Ben is into Christmas year-round. But because our love story is so connected to Christmas—it’s a part of who we are as a couple. The presents, the ornaments, the food, the songs, the scents, the lights and all that our family does to celebrate Jesus’ birth. The magic and joy of the season are a feast for all the senses God has given us.

Back when I was a sophomore at Jones County Junior College, just down the road from Laurel, I was the design director for the yearbook, and we were doing a feature story on this guy Ben, a big presence on campus. I had a secret crush on him. At six foot six, always surrounded by friends, he was impossible to miss.

We finally met in early December when he came to the yearbook office to do the interview. Three days later, we got in my blue VW Bug and drove over to Mason Park to look at the Christmas lights. By day six, we knew we were going to get married. I know it sounds crazy, but that’s why we call that week in December “love week.”

All too soon, Ben had to leave to be with his family for Christmas. My mom had just tried out the recipe for these chocolate, oatmeal and peanut butter cookies. You don’t bake them—you boil them. Super easy. Ben took one bite and loved them. So she put a huge batch in a gallon-sized Ziploc baggie, and he ate them on his five-hour drive home. Couldn’t afford to stop for a burger. Didn’t need to.

Every Christmas since, Mama has boiled a batch. “Why do you make those awful cookies?” Daddy will mutter. “I can’t stand them.” “They’re not for you,” Mama says. “They’re for Ben.”

What would we do without the love of parents, making Christmas happen for their children?

I got the love-to-cook gene from Mammaw, my grandmother on my dad’s side. She was the keeper of our family recipes. She made something we called Mother Goose’s Sunday Rice, a concoction of rice, chicken broth, onions, bell pepper and Velveeta cheese. One of our many favorites.

But when Mammaw died in May 2020, at the age of 97, we couldn’t find any of those recipes. We helped Daddy sort through her belongings: the crocheted doilies, the Blue Willow dishes, the glass tea pitcher, the dented aluminum biscuit bowl. I took photos of each room, exactly as she had left them, so we would always remember the Christmases and birthdays and Sundays spent around her dinner table and her out-of-tune piano. I found a few cookbooks but not her recipes.

Finally it was time to give the last of her things to Goodwill. We were hoisting her dining room console when its door flew open, nearly spilling the contents onto the pavement. Inside were two ceramic canisters, one shaped like a ripe peach, the other like a basket of strawberries.

They were stuffed to the brim with her hand-written recipes. Peanut brittle, my cousin Jim’s favorite Christmas cake, spaghetti and meatballs, her famous creamy layered dessert called Chocolate Delight. It felt like a wink from heaven, God letting Mammaw give us one final gift that would carry on in us and in our children.

I took those recipes, scanned them into my computer and put them together, along with the photos I took, in a book. Everyone in our family got a copy on Christmas morning. They all cried.

One of the first gifts I ever got was a toy kitchen. At three, I had a miniature stove with tiny pots, pans, utensils, dishes and plastic food that I “cooked” and served to my parents. A few years ago, my cousin Jim and my best friend, Mallorie, got a toy kitchen for their daughter, and Ben helped them set it up.

We had no idea how much work it took. They weren’t finished till well after midnight Christmas Eve. Christmas Eve 2019, Ben was up late building another tiny kitchen for our first-born, and the tradition continues.

Now we look to give our two daughters—Helen, who turns five in January, and one-and-a-half-year-old Mae—the magic of Christmas.

For Helen, it begins well before December. Ben has taken to singing her a slew of Christmas songs all year long. Helen has assigned me only one carol, “Away in a Manger.” It’s become her favorite lullaby, our bedtime duet.

We want Helen and Mae to know there’s a reason for the season. On December 1, out comes the Advent calendar. Mama made a beautiful one of fabric. It has a Christmas tree on top with jingle bells, and at the base are 24 small pockets, each holding a tiny ornament. Every night we read a line or two from the Christmas story in the Bible. Then Helen takes out the ornament and hangs it on the fabric tree.

Our daughters are catching that Advent feeling of joyful anticipation, counting the days. For our church’s variety show, Helen plans to do a dance from The Nutcracker or sing a carol. “Away in a Manger,” of course!

Another family favorite is “Blue Christmas,” sung by Elvis Presley. We play his Christmas album every year. Mama used to tell my brother, Clark, and me, “Now, kids, I want you to know there are only two kings in this world: Jesus and Elvis.” King Elvis helps us celebrate the birth of the King of kings.

Mama got to see Elvis in concert twice, and there’s a video of me as a newborn with my dad and uncle and grandfather singing “Blue Christmas.” Horribly out of tune, mind you.

Every year, Mama puts out on the buffet a ceramic sculpture of Elvis Presley’s Graceland, something she got years ago. That first Christmas, we sprinkled fake snow all over the lawn. Somehow that snow has survived. Every year, we gather it up and sprinkle the same snow on Elvis’s ceramic lawn. No wonder the first word Helen learned to spell was E-L-V-I-S!

The sense that’s most evocative to me is smell. There are so many scents I associate with Christmas. Mulling spices warming on the stovetop, the things Mama baked. I’d come home from college, pull into the driveway, the house glowing like a lantern. And even before I walked in the door, the cinnamon-clove-nutmeg aroma of apple cobbler greeted me.

In Laurel, the season begins on the first Saturday in December with Pancake Day, put on by the Kiwanis Club for college scholarships. We stand in line on Oak Street, waiting outside the YWCO (the O stands for organization). Every person I’ve ever known is there. Inside the colonial brick building, we feast on all-you-can-eat pancakes, sausages and coffee. Then we go watch the parade—the longest Christmas parade in the state, they say. One year, Ben and I were Mr. and Mrs. Loblolly Lumberjack, the town mascots, on a float.

It’s worth remembering that scents were part of that very first Christmas, when the wise men brought fragrant myrrh and frankincense as well as gold to the Christ Child. This year, we’re opening a new store called the Laurel Mercantile Scent Library, with 50 fragrances to start.

The magic of fragrance is that you can light a candle and be transported to a memory—every great scent tells a story. Like the smell of Pancake Day or apple cobbler or the pomanders Mama and I used to make every year, sticking a million cloves in oranges so they looked like ornaments, which she’d put on a tiered stand.

I’ve barely mentioned the gifts we give or have been given. Like the cinnamon pears my family gave away at Christmastime. My parents have tons of fruit trees in their backyard, and we’d pick the ripe pears and can them with Red Hots candy.

Or the rock tumbler I got as a kid. It came from a science toys catalog. You’d put in a few rocks and switch it on for weeks of tumbling. Daddy put it in the garage, and I’d check on it. Six weeks later, I took out a handful of polished rocks. I was so excited.

When we were getting ready to open Scotsman Manufacturing, our cutting board factory, I gave Ben a book the CEO of General Motors had written about what gives a company longevity. The year Helen was turning one, he gave me a journal where I could write down the advice I want to give our daughter. I haven’t written in that one yet—it’s too perfect—but I keep a journal to give to my daughters someday. Like that ceramic Graceland that Mama promises to give me. Someday.

Ben and I put snacks in each other’s stockings, Slim Jims and SweeTarts in mine, Slim Jims and Reese’s Peanut Butter Trees in his. The December we met, there were only four stockings over the fireplace in my parents’ house—for me, my brother, Mama and Daddy. Now there are nine. That’s the best thing, the biggest blessing.

Every December, Ben and I celebrate “love week” by doing the same things we did during those first six days. Have lunch at our alma mater’s cafeteria, get cheese sticks from Sonic and ride in an old car to look at the lights in Mason Park.

The whole month of December should feel different from the rest of the year. It’s when we remember how Christ was born. People think it’s crazy that Ben wears a suit, tie and cufflinks every Sunday. But it’s the same thing. He puts on a suit on Sundays because Sundays should feel different. It’s when we worship God.

You might wonder if this sinks in with Helen and Mae, who are pretty young after all. But it’s never too early to start. Helen loves to paint. At age two, she was painting something vigorously, swiping the brush around on the canvas. I glanced over her shoulder and couldn’t believe it.

Without her knowing, we could see that she had painted Baby Jesus in the manger, with Mary and Joseph watching over him. How could she picture the scene so vividly? How did she know? Was it because she heard the story every night with the Advent calendar or sang it with “Away in a Manger”?

We hang up that painting every year at Christmastime—to celebrate the gift that was given to us when Christ was born.

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