Forever something to see ahead of you

by Mitch Jayne

Anabelle Collins had a Christmas tradition that held a family together

In one of those perplexing and head-shaking contradictions with which nature seems to abound, old Anabelle Collins died three weeks before Christmas.

In the natural order of things, any time would have been all right for her to pass on because “Grannybelle” was 85. But what disturbed her three remaining white-haired children, her seven graying grandchildren and the dozens of great-grandchildren, nieces and nephews, who knew her either as “Grannybelle” or “Auntybell,” was that it just wasn’t fair. Christmas had always been Anabelle Collins’s time to shine and now this year she couldn’t.

“Grannybelle,” as even young customers at the Collins Country Store had always called her, had outlived her husband and two of their children, but her love for Christmastime went way back beyond deaths or births. She had simply thought Christmas had more to do with what life should amount to in the first place and saw the holiday as her chance to brighten her corner of the world.

She’d always done that. To get an idea of her enthusiasm for Christmas, one only had to drive by the little store in the 1990s on a November night, when lights twinkled from a mile away for folks coming on some dark journey. It was, as a neighbor remarked, “Like comin’ up on a carnival, the way Grannybelle strews lights for travelers.” Her great-granddaughter Samantha put it a gentler way. “When I was little, we’d drive around the curve, and I thought Grannybelle’s store looked like Bethlehem.”

However she pulled this off over the years—enchanting her husband, Nathan, her kids, grandkids, and the other four-generation progeny that 85 years can produce—she talked everyone into taking part in her “lights of home” Christmas decoration, which had begun long before the coming of electricity.

Nathan, who, with his new wife, had established the little store in the 1930s, used to love describing her determined Christmas ways in the old days to modern travelers who stopped by her display, whether they needed gas or not.

“My wife, Anabelle, likes folks to know we’re here for ’em,” he always told people. And if they showed interest, he added, “Before electric, Annie used more coal oil than a Katy brakeman every Christmas, hangin’ red and green lamps on the store.”

Nathan, keeping the best to himself, didn’t tell strangers that Anabelle thought the message for wanderers was a visual “We Love Christmas!” best said with lights, or that Nathan, loving her, saw that too and helped her ideas as best he could. He could have told them more, but Nathan always saved his best stories for the newest children. He would tell them that when rural electric finally made it to their house and store—long before the paved highway came—Anabelle, who was only 20 back then, was as delighted with the new electricity as a child with crayons, and she drew the old buildings with lights.

Unlike their skeptical neighbors, she never doubted or feared Edison’s magic a minute. Once the store was wired (even before the house), she sent off for catalogs to see if Sears-Roebuck or Montgomery Ward had discovered that lights might be great for Christmas.

It turned out they had, so Anabelle Collins sold two pigs she’d hand raised and sent off for colored strands for the store’s Christmas tree, the porch over the gas pumps, the overhangs on the feed shed and around all the windows. Only then did she turn to the house 30 yards away and trim it up to the eaves with the new little bulbs.

It took five hours that first time and a lot of child juggling, but standing back after Nathan switched everything on at dark, Anabelle had grinned triumphantly and told her family, “Well, it’s a start.”

Nathan knew her exuberant spending of lights just went along with all the good smells in her kitchen—pie and cookie making and pots of soup she kept steaming for kids and visitors all day long. It was the way Anabelle saw Christmas. She sort of saw the shining store by the road as a Christmas “lighthouse” in those hard times, to show warm thanks to anyone who would stop.

Until her 60s, Anabelle had done most of the lighting herself, clambering over the store, feed shed and even the old privy to string up Christmas in places she thought needed it. She annually scared her husband and children with every high-ladder adventure, like decorating the store’s old windmill—unused since the electric pump—in a blowing snow.

“Grannybelle” took the onset of arthritis as gracefully as she could, and at 66, mostly turned the climbing part over to her family. The grown children always came home to help. As the oldest of these, John once jokingly told his siblings, “Do the old windmill before Dad breaks a leg trying to beat Mother to it.”

Nathan’s part of the yearly contest ended peacefully at age 75, when Dixie, the middle daughter, discovered her father asleep at his deer stand, his head leaning against a venerable oak. It was the ultimate sleep, and Dixie, seeing it, set her rifle next to his and sat down by him to tell him how she felt for a while before she went to get help. It was a Collins thing to do, sort of an “Anabelle view,” to make the best of what you had and appreciate the people you had shared it with.

That view survived Nathan’s passing, as did Anabelle herself. But, from that day on, the running of the business was mostly left to John and his wife, Sue, along with the one or two children or grandchildren who showed an interest in the little place.

The country store was dying too, of course; its function taken over by bigger, more modern convenience stores and gas stops, and a highway that whipped people past before they even saw Anabelle’s bright hand-lettered sign, “Collins Country Store.” She carefully repainted it every year, but it was too small for the times. Old customers had died over the years and their children had left for towns—and better lives. Now, no one slowed much to read it anyway.

But when Anabelle died the first week of December, the Collins clan, most now wearing married names and bringing far-off families, came home to remember her. Waiting for the late-comers were all the old lights, as well as the new ones the old lady had ordered for this Christmas, strung up by John and Dixie and Val, the children who lived closest to home.

The funeral was to be in town, with the old-fashioned “visitation” at the cavernous funeral home, but John first gathered the family at his big house, just down the road from the old store, which today wore a black wreath and a closed sign.

Nathan’s and Anabelle’s old house behind the store—the place where everyone present had been appearing for family gatherings, Thanksgivings and at least part of every Christmas most of their lives—was lit up and ready, as always, for visitors from son John’s bigger house.

John’s wife, Sue, managed to crowd everybody into their sizeable living room, kids and all (as usual for any Collins gathering), so that her husband could be heard, because he had something to tell them.

“Well, Mama’s gone,” he began, “and I was going to read this at her funeral tomorrow but decided it’s just for us. Mama knew she was going, and you know how she was—she wanted to say it right before her mind went. She wrote this letter to everybody last month.”

Carefully unfolding a sheet of paper, John took out his glasses, perched them on his nose and read aloud.

“Dear Everybody,” John grinned, peering over his specs with a ‘see, I told you’ look and continued reading:

“The doctor has told me it would be a good idea to get settled up with the world, and I guess that means I might not be with you come Christmas, at least in this shape, which right now I won’t miss a bit.

“Now you must listen to John, who knows we have to close the store. Don’t you grown folks fuss with him about this. It’s my idea. The store’s time is gone, same as Nathan’s and mine, and there’s hardly a soul alive to use it, much less need it like old-timers did.

“But there is one thing that should outlive that store at Christmastime, and that’s what all our lights meant to travelers and neighbors alike in rough times—a cheerful, lit-up place that gave you something to see ahead of you.

“So whatever John and Dixie and Val might do with the store will be fine with me, but I’ve saved out the plot in back with the old windmill tower on it for you kids to tend, if you’re of a mind. That old tower is treated oak and stout as iron and has rungs all around it for kids to climb.

“Would some of you children always come back here and see to it that there’s lights on top for strangers at Christmas time? I have a mess of lights waiting for you. Use your imagination and string up whatever you want. I always did.”

John paused here and looked over his glasses at the scattered children and when he continued reading the letter, his voice was gentle.

“Maybe your own kids and their kids’ kids will think it’s foolish in their time and maybe it might seem to be. Folks change and forget custom, but I don’t reckon nobody’s liable to forget Christmas. Just keep in mind, they will always need a star of some kind to look for.

“Much love to all you folks! --Grannybelle”

John folded the letter, took off his specs and smiled at the outburst of children’s excited voices that followed.

“Well,” John told the adults, “I guess that’s the last we’ll all hear from Mama, but right now let’s go help the children make sure she’ll always have her say.”

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