When Christmas Came to the Dogtrot
We
first went to Africa a few weeks before my sixth birthday. We were assigned to be missionaries in the
Belgian Congo and our first mission station was at the end of a dirt road not
far north of the equator.
The
year I was thirteen, while my brother, Jim, and I were away at boarding school,
our parents relocated our mission station across the river to a more densely
populated area and moved our family to a new, temporary “home.” It was a government rest house consisting of
two dogtrot buildings and a separate cookhouse.
In each dogtrot there were two rooms on either side of an open breezeway—the
place where the dog could trot through—but all under one roof. The two dogtrots rested on either side of a
deep ditch for rainwater run off. A low
bridge spanned the ditch.
Our
parents’ bedroom was in one room of the main house. We ate our meals at the table in the open
breezeway in the middle. Our living room was on the other side. Jim’s and my bedrooms were in the other
dogtrot.
In the tropics of
Africa, December is one of the hottest months of the year. It’s also the season for Congo’s torrential
rains, so it was not only hot, but also very humid. Sometimes at meals, we were driven inside because
mist from heavy rains blew in the open ends of the breezeway, sifting over the food
and dampening our shoulders.
That
year, on Christmas Eve morning, my first thought was: Evergreens don’t grow in the tropics. Where will we get a Christmas tree? (This was long before fake trees were invented.)
At breakfast I
asked my Dad, “What are we going to do for a Christmas tree?”
Dad’s
hearty laugh rang out. “Don’t you
worry,” he said. “We’ll find one.”
Would
Dad be able to find a real Christmas
tree to make it a real
Christmas? I had my doubts.
Our
parents’ work occupied them all Christmas Eve morning. Jim, and I moped around. We talked about the
small gifts we had managed to buy for our parents out of our school snack
money. Had Mom and Dad been able to find
presents for us out of our storage barrels, or perhaps from the Congolese shops
nearby? What would Christmas be like
with few presents and no Christmas tree?
We
searched the acacia tree grove surrounding our new home for chameleons and
grasshoppers. I asked Jim where he
thought Dad would find a Christmas tree, but his answer wasn’t very
satisfactory.
After lunch I took
my key and went to my room in search a book. Maybe I could catch a nap in the relative coolness
under the grass-thatched roof. But I
couldn’t forget my troubling question—What kind of a Christmas would it be in
this heat with no tree, no snow and few presents?
By
the time we sat down to supper under the hissing kerosene pressure lamp, no
Christmas tree had materialized. The
glass ornaments still lay forlornly in their sad, dusty little boxes.
“Daddy,
what about a Christmas tree?” I asked.
Dad
smiled.
“Will
we even have presents?” I persisted.
“Don’t
you worry,” Dad said, patting my shoulder.
“We’ll have a tree and
presents. Now you kids go to your rooms
and go to sleep.”
Jim took our
lantern and, walking side by side, with the red mud of Africa caking onto the
soles of our shoes, I watched the lantern
light make huge shadows jump and dance besides us as we crossed the yard and
the bridge.
“Good night!” Our
parents called, standing in silhouette because of the lantern light behind them.
“Don’t forget to
lock your doors!” Mama reminded. She never
forgot that, even though at thirteen and sixteen we were practically grown-ups.
“Merry Christmas!”
we called back to them from our side of the ditch.
I lit the kerosene
lamp in my bedroom and dropped the mosquito net, tucking the hem under my mattress.
Jim checked under my bed and in the
corners for spiders, geckoes or mice that might have wanted a dry place to
sleep. Then he waited outside my door until
he heard the bolt of my lock slide into place.
“Goodnight,” we
called to each other through the rough panels.
“Merry Christmas!”
At breakfast on
Christmas morning, there was still no tree.
But when Dad left the table, he wandered off into the acacia forest
whistling “Jingle Bells.”
About 20 minutes
later Dad reappeared with a dozen willowy wands of acacia tree limbs.
“It’s our
Christmas tree!” Dad said with a big smile.
An acacia is not
an evergreen. An acacia is a deciduous
tree with rather broad leaves and I knew it would wilt pretty quickly. I was
not impressed.
But Jim, making
the best of things, helped Dad tie the stems together and bury the blunt ends
in a bucket of damp sand.
“What a dumb
Christmas this is!” I groused as Jim and I hung the glass ornaments on our
“tree.” The bundle of limbs shifted in
the sand as we carefully placed the ornaments where they wouldn’t fall
off. I flung tinsel on the branches, but
most of it just slid to the floor.
We each brought
out our few meager presents from their hiding places and placed them close to
the sand bucket. Even when Mama and
Daddy brought gifts from their bedroom, it seemed like a pitiful show to
me. It just didn’t feel like Christmas!
Before noon, the
dog’s tail had knocked off an ornament. We’d brought these glass ones from the
States, so losing even one felt like a calamity.
As the day heated
up, the branches began to wilt and another Christmas ornament shattered to red
and green shards on the cement floor. We
usually opened our gifts on Christmas night, but Mama said, “Let’s open our
gifts now before another ornament breaks.”
“No snow, no
evergreens and few presents!” I sat back
and crossed my arms over my chest. “This
is not Christmas!” I huffed, but only loudly enough for my brother to hear.
Dad wiped
perspiration from his forehead and opened his Bible to read the Christmas
story. He read it all: about Gabriel
appearing to Mary, about Mary’s visit to Elizabeth’s home, about the angels,
the star and the shepherds. “And she
brought forth her firstborn son,” he read, “and wrapped him in swaddling
clothes—” Dad’s voice halted when another ornament crashed to the floor “—and
laid him in a manger; because there was no room for them in the inn.… Glory to
God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men” (Luke 2, KJV).
Suddenly, my heart
stirred and I took a deep breath. A
Savior had been born! The truths of the miraculous arrival of God’s precious
Son, Jesus, spun in my mind like fine strands of gold. There, in the scorching heat of a tropical
Christmas day, without much of the holiday trappings I so craved, God’s love
story and the meaning of Christmas became real to my heart.
I had yearned for
a ‘real’ Christmas, and here it was. I
finally realized that Christmas is more than snow, more than decorations and more
than gifts. Christmas is God’s love
shown to each of us and by each of us to one another. That’s
when Christmas came to the dogtrot.
