Stille Nacht

Bean & Heff are staying home for Christmas this year, then braving all this horrible Western snow to join us in Utah after the actual day, and we've been talking about what of our family's traditions she's going to include for her kids.

Our family made some changes to the traditions over the years, necessitated first by our move to Fresno and then somehow cheese soup on Christmas Eve got replaced by the Bethlehem dinner, which Pops does somewhat begrudgingly since it involves lying prone on a vinyl Christmas tablecloth in the middle of the living room and eating sandwiches, dates, olives, and grapes, and drinking Welch's white grape juice out of our Christmas mugs. It's a simple meal that's easy to prepare, and is meant to call our minds back to Israel and away from Santa or the Food Network. I could do without the lying on the floor, like Pops, but it's hard to object to how the change in altitude lends itself to a different kind of family unity. And it's the only time of year we drink white grape juice, which Buddy would probably tell you is the best part.

I have come to believe that every tradition Mom instituted has been motivated by a desire for her children to feel connected to each other; when we were younger, that meant putting aside animosity and saying out loud why we loved each other before we opened the simple gifts of a notepad or a basket with hotel shampoo purchased for a dime at the Nelson sale. I think I was the most unlovable then, because the kids usually said about me: "I love Lis because she gives me rides."

Now that we're adults, we get along fundamentally and are generally terribly fond of each other -- in-laws included, which I find to be no small blessing -- but we can be reticent about being demonstrative and can be easily embarrassed by overly emotional displays. I suspect it is our German guarding, but the trouble is that these kinds of traditions call up all this love that Mom has been fostering all these years, so we are presented with an emotional conundrum.

Never was that more obvious than the year that, on Christmas Eve, before presents, instead of visiting the Living Nativity in a nearby Central California town whose name I don't think any of us kids could tell you (we called it Pootown because of, well, the cow population), all of us went downtown to a hospital to visit a dying German woman with whom Pops spoke their shared native language and took care of spiritually. When she was more well, she had been on our Christmas caroling route, along with her other fellow widows and elderly people from the ward, but that year we took our Stille Nacht to the hospital room.

Though it is our heritage, we did not sing it with great accents; Pops would print out these papers with the lyrics and we'd have a quick pronunciation lesson before we left, which helped a little. The problem in the hospital room wasn't our pronunciation or our singing, but that once we started and were moved by the promise of the words and the sadness of her looming death, we were forced to sing over tremendous lumps in our throats, and eventual crying. This was, of course, embarrassing for teenagers and almost-teenagers, so we looked away and let our parents do the comforting words to Martha, but I think if you surveyed the Muelleck kids, it would be included among our sweetest Christmas memories. We will likely always think of Martha Lehwalder when we hear Stille Nacht.