Christmas, 1988

The year I was 12, we were robbed on Christmas Eve. Nonetheless, it was my favorite childhood Christmas. 

That Christmas Eve in Liberia, as always, was warm; the equator hovering just a few degrees south of us. ELWA compound was a square mile in size, one of the largest mission stations in the world, with over 70 missionary homes surrounding a hospital and radio station. Our house had a large front porch with a hammock and a concrete railing. When you stood on that porch, the swamp was to the right, it’s murky water adorned with lily pads and surrounded by mangrove trees, their spiderly legs creeping around the edges.

The swamp was fed by a lagoon on the other side of the dusty, red dirt road, which was fed by the Atlantic Ocean. Our Christmas music was the rhythmic pulsing of the waves, their white crests glowing in the darkness. 

Four or five families set up luminarias that Christmas Eve – paper bags filled with sand and a candle. We lined the dirt road with them, and one neighbor found a large piece of styrofoam and set one bag floating on the lagoon. The magic of that night – the stillness, the waves, the flickering light suspended in the shadows – settled down into my 12-year-old soul.

Later that evening we sat around our spindly plastic tree to open presents. There weren’t a lot of gift options available in Liberia in the 80’s, but I remember being delighted with everything I received. However, the only specific gift I can recall was a small, furry whimsical creature that sat in a hollowed out, heavily varnished coconut shell, a homemade toy sold by a woman who walked the mission station, her wares balanced proudly on her head. 

When the tropical sun woke us on Christmas morning, the contents of our stockings engrossed my brother and me. We heard a shriek from our mom in the kitchen. During the night, thieves had sliced through the screen on the window above our kitchen sink, the only window that didn’t have bars. They removed the louvered glass, stepped over the turkey defrosting in the sink, and stole our cassette player, our thermos jug, and my mom’s purse, which had been hanging on a chair.

Anxiety made an appearance, but gratefulness soon overshadowed it. We realized none of us had woken during the intrusion, and so we had avoided a traumatic confrontation that could have been dangerous. My mom was thankful they had not taken our very expensive turkey — worth more than anything stolen. I noted that had we not followed our tradition of opening gifts on Christmas Eve, those might have been taken too. The compound security guards arrived on their motorcycles 30 minutes later, but the rogues (as they were called in Liberian English) were never found. (A couple of months later, some teenage snorkelers found my mom’s empty purse lodged in the ocean reef.)

But even this violation didn’t steal the joy from that Christmas. Throughout the day, Liberian children appeared at the screen door, decked out in new clothes and party hats. “Where’s my Christmas?” they gleefully asked, and we doled out candy to their outstretched hands. Friends, some old, some new, arrived for Christmas dinner. A young German doctor brought sparklers, and stuck one in the non-stolen, now baked, Christmas turkey splurge. I had never before seen a sparkler, and I stared transfixed. 

After dinner, we played Uno and Up the Hill and Down Again around our big wooden table, as we always did when guests came over. The ocean breeze drifted through the screens, the frogs sang in the swamp, the waves murmured in harmony. 

My whole life, I’ve remembered this Christmas as my favorite. But writing it down made me struggle with what made it stand out. I mean, really? Paper bag lanterns and a toy in a coconut shell and a sparkler in a turkey and….a robbery? Perhaps it’s because it’s not so much the “what” in our lives that moves us – the stuff and schedules and activities. It’s the beauty and meaning and love, and that Christmas was brimming with it. As I construct my own children’s Christmases, that’s what I want to remember.