Bonanza
~*~*~ Advent Calendar ~*~*~
* Day 17 *

Summary: Death doesn’t put an end to our relationships with the ones we love. Especially at Christmas!
Rating:  G
Words:  1,655

With Elizabeth

“I hate Christmas!”

Even as Ben Cartwright spoke the words he knew they weren’t true. Christmas wasn’t the problem; it was the cold, the wind, the solitude, the helplessness. The emptiness. The utter failure of his life. Christmas was supposed to banish such earthly troubles, to fill him up with God’s joy and love. Unfortunately, he wasn’t being filled by anything divine just now.

Worse, a small head was poking out from the immobilized wagon; a head with huge, owl-dark eyes and white, pinched cheeks. Naturally Adam would have heard his outburst. Was there any embarrassing moment of his life that Adam didn’t notice?

Well, he’d just have to devise an explanation. To his surprise, he found himself saying, “You know, your grandfather never celebrated Christmas Day. Not everyone does, not even every Christian.”

“Why not?” Of course Adam could never accept a plain statement of fact without examination.

Calling Christmas celebrations popery, as Abe Stoddard always had, would not satisfy the boy, who didn’t know what “popery” meant. This was not the time to burrow into the details of sectarian divisions! “Some people think putting so much effort into worldly pleasures isn’t the right way to celebrate Christ’s birth–that something else is more important.”

“Oh, yes. To look after the poor. The truly poor, not like us.”

Now where had that come from? But there was comfort, ridiculous as it might be, in knowing that Adam didn’t think of himself or his father as “truly poor.” Resolutely Ben tried to pursue his original insight.

“No, what worried your grandfather–well, your mother, to be honest–was that people would stop remembering the purpose of Jesus’ birth. The coming of our souls’ salvation. Too much feasting and present-giving and song and dance can keep us from concentrating on whether we’re making good use of that holy gift. Everything else is…not important. At least, that’s what her church told her, and she believed it.”

“She didn’t like singing and dancing?” Adam’s eyes were wider than ever.

“She did! Of course she did, and feasting and giving presents too, all in their proper time and place. She just didn’t want them to smother the higher meaning of Christmas. And when I was with her, I must admit, I didn’t much hanker after any of that myself. Having her beside me was all I needed to know I was living my life right.”

“Oh,” Adam said, very quietly, and withdrew like a tiny turtle into the wagon.

For a moment all Ben wanted was to follow him and wrap him in warm arms until some color came back to his cheeks, but that would do nothing to move the massive tree trunk blocking the road. That was his true complaint about Christmas–on any other day, there would be other people whose travel was being interrupted, enough that together they could move the blockage and continue on their way. In Massachusetts so many people still ignored the holiday that he would only have needed to wait an hour or so before a small crowd would assemble. But here, today, his wagon was the only thing on the road. Everyone else was snug at home, putting off until the morrow what might have been done today. He should have taken shelter in the last village he’d passed through, postponing his journey until the brewing storm blew over, but the thought of being trapped there, penniless and unable to give his son the tiniest amount of Christmas cheer, had made his guts twist up within him. If they both froze to death here it would be no more than he deserved, he decided sourly.

“Now, now, you’ve never been one to put off necessary work,” a merry voice sounded in his head. He could almost see Elizabeth, fabric draped in her lap and needle in her hand, finishing up some piece of needlework. Could recall how she’d look up at him and laugh until his frowns slid off his face.

“But it’s my pride that snared us,” he answered her in his mind.

“There was no work for you there,” she reminded him–or helped him remember. “You needed to be somewhere you could find work. You didn’t want to run out of food before you found a way to earn money for more. That wasn’t pride; that was good sense. What if the storm had trapped you in that place?”

“It’s blocked this road pretty well,” he retorted.

“Oh, you’ll find a way around it,” she said with complete certainly. “You always do.” She bent her head back over her work and vanished from his imagination as suddenly as she had come, leaving him staring once more at the fallen tree.

A way around it–or a way over it? Of course! And his love for Elizabeth, for his heart’s true companion, blazed up as freshly as on the day they’d wed.

~*~*~

“If we wait until morning it will be froze harder,” Adam ventured, staring at what they had built. What Pa had built, mostly, being so much bigger and stronger. Adam had mostly helped by jumping up and down on the mounds of snow and broken branches, packing them hard so they could bear the weight of the wagon. Or so he and Pa hoped.

Ben firmly repressed the urge to mutter, “As long as we don’t freeze too.” It was getting dark, after all, and they had branches to spare for a fire. He was already warming the blankets that would cover them while they slept. Dinner, however sparse, would warm them from within. They’d weathered worse; no doubt they would again.

“I made something for us to have Christmas with,” Adam said once they had eaten. “A…a putzen, like what you had as a boy, before you went to sea.”

“A Nativity scene?” Ben asked cautiously, surprised Adam had used the old German term. He didn’t remember having told the boy much about the customs where he had grown up.

“Yes! See, this is Joseph keeping watch….”

The misshapen pine cone did have the same protective stoop as the carved figures Ben remembered.

“And this is blue, so it’s for Mary….”

How did he ever find a feather in all this snow–and when could he have been looking for one?

“And here is the manger and the little baby.” Adam laid down a bit of walnut shell and dropped a dried pea into it.

Ben had to clear his throat before he could say, “That’s lovely, Adam. Exactly as it should be.”

“Do you…do you think Mother would have liked it?”

“Oh, son,” Ben whispered with perfect confidence. “She would have loved it, Adam.”

Then before they did anything else, Ben took care to wrap the little Nativity in his handkerchief and stow it away in the safest corner of the wagon. Only after that did he hug Adam closely to him, and bundle them both together within every coat and blanket they possessed, so they could settle their brains for a long winter’s nap.

And for the first time since her death, that night Ben dreamed of Elizabeth without feeling pain or grief, warmed by the memory of their love.

~*~*~

Forty years later, in the year of Our Lord eighteen hundred seventy-five, Ben cleared the last of the Ponderosa’s year-end paperwork from his desktop and leaned back with a happy sigh. “Nothing left now but the celebrating,” he murmured to himself, quoting his middle son, who was no doubt smacking his lips in his sleep, dreaming of all that Hop Sing would produce for the family on the Christmas day to come. Joe and Jamie were safely tucked upstairs too. Three Cartwright sons filling the bedrooms, each determined to sustain their family traditions in every way they could. And the fourth son, the wandering planet, seemed little farther away that night.

Adam wrote regularly, long newsy epistles the whole family assembled to hear Ben read aloud, but somehow his Christmas letters always had a special touch. This year it had been particularly so. Ben unfolded the crisp paper lying on top of his letter pile and re-read the central paragraphs.

“They certainly do celebrate Christmas in Boston now, Pa! I just came home from a presentation of Handel’s Messiah–the audience was encouraged to join in the Alleluia and Amen choruses, though we were dutifully silent elsewhere. As I came home past all the decorations I wondered what Grandfather would have made of it all, but I’m sure Mother isn’t too unhappy about it. Last week I took some holly and ivy to her grave, and both are still fresh and gay today, so I think she approves of them, at least!

“Do you remember that night we spent in Ohio, when we had to build a bridge over the fallen tree? It’s really my earliest Christmas memory of all–especially the joy I felt when you smiled at me in the teeth of all our difficulties. There was a special meaning to it, even more than I find here in the busy city. No contamination by “worldly pleasures” for us that day! Perhaps the Stoddards were right after all; it really is far too easy nowadays to forget what Christmas ought to mean.”

Ben refolded the letter and laid it with all Adam’s others. Then, taking a deep breath, he reached into a different part of his desk and brought out the little treasures hidden there. Carefully he arranged them in a cluster under the lamp, remembering Adam’s eager, childish voice. The familiar warmth and wonder rose in him again as he looked at what had, despite all custom and all circumstance, given him a Christmas celebration with Elizabeth.

A pine cone, a ragged blue jay’s feather, and half a walnut shell.

~*~*~

My prompt: “just settled our brains for a long winter’s nap”, from A Visit from St. Nicholas by Clement Clarke Moore
Characters: Ben and Adam
Summary: Death doesn’t put an end to our relationships with the ones we love. Especially at Christmas!

Link to Bonanza Brand 2023 Advent Calendar – Day 18 – The Milk of Human Kindness by Puchi Ann