Life is often like a roller coaster ride. Things are going
great; then the bottom drops out of your life; then you start to climb again.
The Christmases of 1965, 1966 and 1967 were like that.
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| Our home in Bountiful Christmas 1965 |
In
1965 we had purchased a home on Orchard Drive in Bountiful and our beautifully decorated tree in silver that Christmas symbolized that “perfect” life. Both Ed
and I were working—Ed for Zion’s First National Bank and I for GMAC (the
financing branch of General Motors). We’d purchased a new Pontiac at wholesale
through my job, and Ed was taking a full load of college courses. He was due to
graduate from the University of Utah in less than a year. Most exciting of all,
after two years of marriage we were expecting our first child.
But that he dropped one class in January of 1965; That
made it so he wasn’t taking enough college classes for him to be exempt from
the draft, so he was eligible to be drafted in the Vietnam War. He joined the
Army as a candidate for flight school and was gone before Valentine’s Day. I miscarried
the baby I was expecting, and moved back home with my Dad.
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| Our homemade Christmas tree |
Christmas
of 1966 found us in southern Alabama living in a trailer while Ed was attending
army flight school. Everything we had with us had fit into the car I’d driven
down to be with Ed during flight school. We’d lost the nice home, of course,
but we were together. We had no phone, no Christmas tree, very little material
goods. I’d miscarried not only the baby I’d been expecting the Christmas
before, but another baby a few months before.
My dad wrote and asked what we wanted for Christmas and I
asked for a case of Danish Dessert! I loved it, and we couldn’t buy it anywhere
down in Alabama.
We couldn’t afford a Christmas tree, so Ed took some chicken
wire and wrapped it around the evergreen branches that we cut off, and made a
small two-foot high “tree” for our trailer and put pine cones on it for
ornaments. (We wouldn’t have had a place to put a real one anyway.)
I
went to the library and got old newspapers and we cut out the things we would
have
liked to buy each other for Christmas and we put them in envelopes which
we gave to each other as our Christmas gifts. Christmas morning was so cold, the
pipes were frozen, so we had no water—no Christmas dinner for us! However, I
was determined to call home and talk to my family.
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| Some of my Christmas "wishes" |
In those days you could call anywhere in the United States
for $1.00, so I searched every couch, every car seat, every chair to find a
dollar in change. Then when I had enough, Ed drove me to a gas station where I
changed the coins for quarters to call home. It was the first time I’d talked
to my family since I’d moved away to join Ed. Talking to them was a wonderful
Christmas gift.
Then we went home and that afternoon, when we had water, I
cooked Danish Dessert.
They had closed the flight school and the base for two
weeks for Christmas, so we had two weeks’ vacation, whether we could go
anywhere or not.
We and some of the other poor flight school couples stayed
on base in our trailers and met every day to play board games with each other.
It was fun. I don’t recall wishing I could have gone sight-seeing, or touring;
I was so glad I could be there with Ed.
The Army’s Christmas gift to us, of course, was Ed’s
orders for Vietnam as soon as he finished flight school. He received them on
the last day before Christmas break. The reality of them hovered over us like
an unspoken threat all during Christmas. No one wanted to mention them, but
they were implicit in everything we said and did. All during Christmas I
wondered, “Where will he be next year? What will he be doing? Will he be
alive?”
The Christmas
of 1967 found Ed fighting in Vietnam as a helicopter pilot. I was back in Utah alone—except for our baby son
that I brought home on Christmas Day. Ed was able to call me that Christmas
season as the Red Cross contacted him, and he called to congratulate me on our
son.
Life
was on the upbeat again
as long as we were a family!
as long as we were a family!
