A Christmas Nightmare--a story III

A decade ago already, Ruth started having Christmas Eve over at their place because Mom and Dad’s, she’d said, didn’t hold all the kids anymore—grandkids and their spouses, and even great-grandkids, in fact. Ruth, whose Ben never really stopped working, had this big house down in the valley, a place almost without walls, so long and large you could have bowled in the living room. Neither of them could guess where Ruth got their tree, so big it was a shame to cut it down.

And their present to themselves—and from their kids—wasn’t hard to sneak in either because on Tuesdays, when Ruth was working at the store, Mavis went over there to cook supper. Not that she had to. Mavis just loved to cook. So two days before Christmas Eve, she simply took that shoebox over to her daughter’s house, along with the salmon she was going to fix, and slipped that gift in with the other pretty ones, just one of several dozen beneath that huge pine.

*

Mavis is right—they’re good kids, all of ‘em. Not that they’re not sinners, but then, as the Psalmist says, who can stand before the throne of God? They show up for church, which is important, Henk and Mavis both say, but sometimes there’s no lights on there, and there should be. They don’t think like Christians in the business world, Henk had come to believe, despite the fact that they were taught not to leave their love for the Lord somewhere in the warehouse with the trade-in mattresses.

Ben works hard, not a lazy bone in his body, but sometimes he doesn’t pay a dime’s worth of attention to Ruth, who carries way too much of a load at home and always did. Deb and Reinder talk a lot about the Lord, but the others sometimes want to oust him from the business because dreamy Reinder has this habit of not showing up for work, then telling the rest of them that he was doing Habitat work, or buying hamburgers for the homeless.

Silent Sam isn’t the brightest lamp in the showroom. What he really loves is his four-wheelers, and he wouldn’t miss a race all summer long if Deb didn’t make sure he showed up once-in-a-while for church. Tim and Sarah are the artists, too cool for their brothers and sisters, both of them sporting tattoos and an array of earrings you only see on pirates, Henk says.

Not a bum in the bunch, but Mavis and Henk just weren’t sure any of them really loved the Lord, just weren’t sure the message ever got through, and just weren’t sure where in this life they’d gone wrong.

(to be continued)