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You are here: Home / My Family / A Memore of Christmas Past

A Memore of Christmas Past

December 22nd, 2015 by Sallie Bingham in My Family, New Mexico 1 Comment

Farolitos, Canyon Road

Farolitos, Canyon Road © Bonn Macy

Nostalgia is not my strong suit. Most family rituals, in my experience, long outlive their usefulness. The enthusiasm small children grant to celebrations fades rapidly as the big world pushes in, perhaps especially in the case of Christmas when small children have learned to view any delay in present-giving as an injustice.

Fortunately, there are exceptions.

In my old neighborhood here in Santa Fe, Canyon Road is thronged for the Christmas Eve walk, with farolitos and bonfires lighting the way as the crowds surge in, it sometimes seems from all corners of the earth. The Walk was originally useful to neighbors making their way over snow and ice to the Christmas Eve midnight service at Christo Rey Church. It’s safe to assume that none of the revelers now consider the church their goal.

But they sing carols, strangers gathered around in door yard fires, carols some of them may have sung as children.

Nostalgia is not my strong suit. Most family rituals, in my experience, long outlive their usefulness... Fortunately, there are exceptions.

We didn’t sing carols at home when I was growing up in Kentucky, but we often put on plays; Christmas Eve was our mother’s birthday. She would be 108 years old if she was alive today.

Nearly always, the play was my adaptation of Charles Dickens’ Christmas Carol, with our father rattling car chains in the basement as the ghost of Scrooge’s partner, Joseph Marley.

Father read the story out of one of the handsome leather bound 1900 Complete Editions my sister sent me recently. The front page is a copy of the first page of the story, in Dickens’ cramped handwriting, with some crossings out and additions.

"Marley's Ghost"

“Marley’s Ghost”

The first line stands unaltered: “Marley was dead, to begin with.”

Dickens sometimes indulged in nostalgia but often he was delightfully cold-blooded, which shocked and attracted me when I was a child.

Marley had been Scrooge’s partner in their law firm for many years, but after Marley’s death, “Scrooge was not so dreadfully cut up by the sad event, but that he was an excellent man of business on the very day of the funeral, and solemnized it with an undoubted bargain”—of which Marley, also an excellent man of business with ice water in his veins, would certainly have approved.

Although Scrooge, a terrible miser, was frightened straight by the three ghosts who follow Marley’s visit, the last of whom, the Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come, is “shrouded in a deep black garment, which concealed its head, its face and its form, leaving nothing visible, save one outstretched hand.”

With its outstretched hand, it points to Scrooge’s own corpse, being stripped of its garments by predatory attendants who even steal the curtains off his bed. At this dreadful spectacle, Scrooge asks if there is any way to change the future. It is changed by his own change into a charitable man.

The description of this third ghost, in my father’s voice that always relished terrifying his children, caused the younger ones to scream with terror.

This Christmas Eve, two of my three sons and I, with the two blessed new members of the family, will be reading this story aloud from the big leather-bound book. How appropriate it seems in this haunted time, to start the celebration with this bitter potion, never entirely sweetened, to my mind, by Scrooges’ repentance of the appearance, for Tiny Tim’s family, of a Christmas goose.

For more on my family’s production of A Christmas Carol, please read Christmas Is A-Coming…

[Engraving by Fred Barnard (1878) from Victorianweb.org, which includes many fine engravings of his and others, and additionally a dedicated Dickens’ “Christmas Books” collection page for engravings by Fred Barnard.]

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In My Family, New Mexico Santa Fe Christmas Charles Dickens A Christmas Carol

A long and fruitful career as a writer began in 1960 with the publication of Sallie Bingham's novel, After Such Knowledge. This was followed by 15 collections of short stories in addition to novels, memoirs and plays, as well as the 2020 biography The Silver Swan: In Search of Doris Duke.

Her latest book, Taken by the Shawnee, is a work of historical fiction published by Turtle Point Press in June of 2024. Her previous memoir, Little Brother, was published by Sarabande Books in 2022. Her short story, "What I Learned From Fat Annie" won the Thomas Wolfe Fiction Prize in 2023 and the story "How Daddy Lost His Ear," from her forthcoming short story collection How Daddy Lost His Ear and Other Stories (September 23, 2025), received second prize in the 2023 Sean O’Faolain Short Story Competition.

She is an active and involved feminist, working for women’s empowerment, who founded the Kentucky Foundation for Women, which gives grants to Kentucky artists and writers who are feminists, The Sallie Bingham Center for Women's History and Culture at Duke University, and the Women’s Project and Productions in New York City. She lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Sallie's complete biography is available here.

Comments

  1. Judyth Hill says

    December 22nd, 2015 at 11:54 am

    Sallie…this is a wonderful piece; richly bittersweet, as these times so call for, spiced with the subtle Christmas terror of A Christmas Carol!
    My family too has a scary Scrooge tradition; I’m sharing this with them. I especially love your use of the beautiful, and rarely used word, Memore… “retaining the memory; mindful; and by extension, grateful”…..that is a potent truth of the Holidays for us all….All Blessings, and gratitude to you for your work and stance in the world, Judyth

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