The House Without a Christmas Tree Read Free Page A

asked, sounding surprised.
    â€œWell, I’m ashamed to have them come here.”
    â€œMy glory! Why? You’re not ashamed of your old grandmother, are you?” she asked.
    â€œNo! It’s just … well, I’m ashamed we don’t have a Christmas tree. We’re probably the only people in town who don’t.”
    â€œIf you don’t come here and sing carols, your Dad is going to feel awful bad!” she said.
    â€œIt serves him right!” I said angrily. “I feel bad not having a Christmas tree!”
    â€œAddie! Being vengeful is not Christian! What would Reverend Teasdale say if he heard you talk like that? I’ll bet you wouldn’t be playing the lead angel in the Christmas pageant.”
    I gave a big sigh and went on fixing my halo. I knew the only reason I got to play the lead angel anyway was because I was the tallest and could hold the star of Bethlehem up higher than anyone else, but Grandma thought it was some kind of honor for good behavior, so I let her go on thinking that. She took churchgoing very seriously, and always insisted that I go to Sunday School and church and young people’s Bible-study classes. She didn’t go very often herself because she could no longer hear or see well enough to participate in the services, but she read her Bible faithfully every day.
    When she was reading, she would push her thick glasses up on top of her head, hold her Bible just a few inches from her face and squint at it, sometimes through a magnifying glass. When she found a verse she particularly liked, she would get a stubby little pencil, which she sharpened with a paring knife, and scrawl the verse on a little scrap of paper. She would add that to all her other little scraps of paper. She was always cutting out recipes and patterns from the newspaper and little tidbits of information, four or five line stories that newspapers refer to as “fillers,” which she thought were the best part of the paper. It would be something about Bolivia producing 600,000 tons of coal last year or that the largest tomato in the world was grown by Mr. Jonas Phillips of Rhode Island.
    She tried to keep all these scraps of paper in one place, in a cigar box on the floor near the sofa, but somehow they always found their way to other parts of the house. You never knew when you were going to suddenly be confronted with a verse from Isaiah or part of a Psalm or a recipe for chocolate meat loaf or a flash about Mr. Phillips’ tomato.
    My dad, who was terribly neat and organized, found this quite an irritation, but I rather liked it. I thought it was a pretty good way to get inspired in the middle of dusting under the bed—suddenly finding some message like, “Consider the lilies of the field.” In fact, I always wondered if Grandma didn’t scatter her scraps around on purpose, as a kind of supplementary education project of her own. It would have been just like her, because she liked being in charge of everything, and when she couldn’t do it one way, she would find another.
    I took after her in that respect, and between the two of us, I guess we kept my dad on his toes. He often found himself not knowing quite what to expect next, caught between two rambunctious and unpredictable females.
    I told Grandma then that I would think about our coming to the house to sing Christmas carols.
    â€œYou’d better come,” she said.
    I didn’t say anything for a few moments, as she worked on the hem.
    â€œWhy is Dad so parsimonious?” I asked suddenly.
    â€œThat’s a pretty fancy word.”
    â€œWe learned it in vocabulary this week. It means stingy.”
    â€œHe’s not stingy,” she said. “He’s careful. He remembers what it’s like to be poor. Folks had a bad time back in the Depression.”
    â€œWell, he’s not poor now! He has almost $6,000 in the bank!”
    â€œHow do you know?” she asked, sounding