Grandparent Project Example #1

“I’ll Be Home For Christmas, You Can Count on Me…”
-For all of the Bairds, but especially for Betty and Bob
Betty Jane Baird has had a lot of Christmas mornings in her life, most of them wonderful. But one Christmas stands out as being especially great – the Christmas of 1945. Betty had spent the previous two Christmases – and almost three entire years - without her husband, Bob, who was serving in the US Air Corps in England. But with World War II over, many of our boys were coming home, and Betty was no different than the thousands of other young women anxiously awaiting the return of her husband.
“He’d promised me for weeks that he’d be home for Christmas,” she told me. “But for about two weeks before Christmas, we didn’t hear anything from him. This was very unusual, because we heard from him all the time.”
Christmas morning came, and Betty spent the morning with Bob’s parents. She was living with them at the time. Then around noon, the phone rang. It was Bob. He told her he was at Fort Douglas – he’d gotten in last night, but had to be “mustered out” before he could leave. “He’d said he’d be home for Christmas, and he just made it,” Betty said, laughing her trademark laugh. “We hadn’t heard from him for so long because he’d come home from England by boat, even though he was in the Air Corps.” As we spoke, neither of us could figure out why air corps would get sent home by boat when almost everyone else came home by plane, but that’s the military for you. Maybe there really is something to all those jokes on “MASH”…
That day, Bob’s parents drove Betty up to Fort Douglas to pick him up, as she didn’t have a car. After visiting with family and friends for much of the day, the young couple had to go buy Bob underwear and socks. “And those things were hard to come by in those days, you know, because of the war,” she said. Apparently, while the rest of the corpsmen were reusing their old underwear and socks on the long boat ride home, Bob just threw his overboard once they became dirty. So while Bob got the stereotypical worst gift you can get for Christmas – underwear and socks – Betty got the best gift she could have asked for.
That Christmas was just one of many they shared together. When I asked Betty about those that followed, as a mother and grandmother, she often used the word routine. I am sure given the first few Christmases she spent as a young married woman, the normalcy of the Christmases that followed seemed wonderful. But even those normal events had a Baird twist to them.
For example, getting the tree was quite an event. The entire family went together, and given the personalities of Bruce, Brett, and Marsha, let alone Bob, I can imagine the experience was both excruciating and fun. I have heard stories about going to multiple tree lots, come hell and high water (and lots of snow), to find the perfect tree. Once they found it, the family would drive home, holding the tree alongside the car through the open windows. They’d then decorate the tree with tinsel and glass balls. “They didn’t have all that fancy stuff we have nowadays,” Betty said. After, when the kids weren’t around, Betty went about straightening the tinsel, getting everything just so.
And it’s not just the tree decorating that’s changed over the years, she told me. Christmas for her as a young girl is much different from how it is today, she said. Betty grew up during the Great Depression, and gift-giving was much more modest. She remembered that one year, both she and her brother, Bob, wanted a bike. And they got one for Christmas – one, which they had to share. It was a boy’s bike, a blue and white one speed. “It didn’t impress me,” she said, and that’s probably a good thing, as she didn’t get to ride it much. Betty remembered her mother sewed a lot at Christmas time, and that the kids always had clothes – dresses, PJs, coats… these were the kinds of things she remembered getting. She also said the family always had a tree and a good dinner on Christmas day – chicken, or sometimes rabbit, which her father raised, fresh bread, and cakes. The important thing was the family was together.
Togetherness was what got her through what she called “a tragic Christmas” – the Christmas of 1956. She was bed-ridden that year, due to terrible arthritis in her hips. This made preparation for Christmas hard, because she hadn’t done any Christmas shopping before the arthritis got bad since they were waiting to get Bob’s bonus check. Bob had to kneel by her bed as they wrote the list. He then did all the shopping, “and it must have turned out all right.” Christmas morning, they had to carry her out to the tree so she could watch the kids open their gifts, but could only stay out there for about an hour before she had to be carried back to bed.
But for the most part, Christmas has been blessedly predictable: trees and family, meals and home. And this is something that continues to this day as we gather together at her house – her children and grandchildren, and now her great grandchildren. Coming to Grandma Betty’s for Christmas feels like coming home, like Grandpa Bob did 63 Christmases ago. It’s a feeling exemplified by that beautiful war-song lyric, which could have been written by him, or by any of us: “I’ll be home for Christmas/ You can plan on me/ Please have snow and mistletoe/ And presents on the tree/ Christmas Eve will find me/ where the love-light gleams/ I’ll be home for Christmas/ If only in my dreams.”