Aunt Dimity's Christmas

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My father died when I was three months old. I don’t recall his laughter or his touch. My memories of him came secondhand, through my mother’s words and well-thumbed photo albums.

“Your father was a soldier,” my mom told me, and there he is, in grainy black-and-white, with his GI grin and rumpled uniform, standing in the ruins of Berlin. Kids in ragged clothing cluster near him, holding high the gifts he’s taken from a tattered duffel bag—chocolate bars and chewing gum, socks and stocking caps, bits and bobs finagled from his squad. No department-store Santa ever looked half so merry as my dad did that day, among the children in the ruins of Berlin.

“Your father’s favorite holiday was Christmas,” my mother said, and fully half the photos in the albums prove her point. There he is, years later, playing Santa at our church on the west side of Chicago, baking angel cookies to give to friends and neighbors, placing the star atop one glittering tree after another. While my father was alive, Christmas began on my mother’s birthday, the fourteenth of December, and climaxed with a lavish party on Christmas Eve.

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