My great-grandpa Hinkle was born in 1906. By the time I came along, he was in his 80s and had begun a slow descent into Alzheimer’s, which meant he would often greet us with a curt “who the hell are you” whenever we went for a visit.
On one occasion we were at his home for a Christmas party, where he suddenly shouted “what’s it going to take to get you people to leave?” His outbursts didn’t often make sense, but looking back I can see sometimes he just said things the rest of us are too polite to utter.
My grandma (his daughter) told me once he was always such an odd guy that it wasn’t often clear where his personality ended and the dementia began. Was his habit of passing his dentures around the room for his great-grandchildren to hold before popping them back into his mouth more illness or quirk? We never could say.
Because of Alzheimer’s, great-grandpa would often repeat stories from his life, usually beginning again the moment the story ended. As a result, many of his anecdotes are so ingrained in my mind that they sometimes feel like they happened to me instead.
He would tell one story every Christmas when we went to his house for a visit. He never seemed to like the holiday. It triggered something in him, and I don’t know that any of us ever got a full answer on what that something was. He would sit in the corner of the room, while the family visited and exchanged gifts, and just sort of cry. But at some point, he’d start talking, and tell us the story of his most memorable Christmas.
Great-grandpa Hinkle grew up exceptionally poor in Council Bluffs, Iowa. He came from a wildly abusive home. On one occasion, one of the revolving doors of stepfather figures pulled a gun on him. That’s the sort of environment that was the backdrop of this particular story.
A simple trip to the store
He was around 13 years old, meaning this happened, I guess, right after World War I. Constantly on the verge of homelessness, he was living with his mother and siblings in a run-down hotel room, helping to scrape together enough pennies each week to keep the family somewhat fed and warm. This was a particularly frigid winter in Iowa, per his telling.
Members of his family didn’t really celebrate Christmas because they didn’t have money for gifts. It was easier to try to ignore the day and its annual reminders of their poverty.
That Christmas morning, his mother gave him whatever change she had and asked him to go down to the corner market to buy an item — in repeating the story, he never could remember what the item was. He set off to the store, passing the homes of families keeping warm and exchanging presents.
He arrived at the corner shop, bought the item he was sent to retrieve, and then stepped back onto the icy street wearing whatever rags for clothes he had used to bundle up. As he began to walk away, the store owner came outside and called for him. “He knew our situation,” great-grandpa used to say as tears filled his eyes. “He knew what it was like at home.”
Great-grandpa turned around and paced back to the shopkeeper, who reached out and dropped a handful of nuts into his little palms. “Merry Christmas,” the man said, before turning around and retreating into his store.
Great-grandpa would sometimes say the handful of nuts was the only Christmas gift he ever remembered receiving, and the kindness from the shopkeeper, who apparently had little to spare himself, always stuck with him.
We tend to think about poverty, about homelessness, around this time of year more often than any other time. People struggle outside of the holiday season, of course, but, for some reason, that struggle is more on our collective minds as the snow falls and the wreaths appear on front doors.
Maybe the changing season and the dropping temperatures make it harder to not imagine what it might be like to have nowhere warm to go. Maybe the opulence of the commercial aspects of the holiday celebrations shine a subconscious light on the unfairness of relative privilege and the cruelty in the way it tends to skip a lot of people. Or perhaps the general spirit of giving that permeates December naturally causes us to think about who most needs to receive. I don’t know.
Receiving and giving
Many years ago, a cousin of mine was hurting financially. She was a young single mom and as the holidays approached, my large extended family decided to throw a small party to collect funds to do a surprise Sub for Santa for her. She was invited to this party but was not told she was going to be the intended recipient of the charity. As the event wrapped up, my cousin handed the party organizer two dollars from her purse and said, “I hope this helps whoever this is all going to. I sure know what it’s like to struggle.”
I think about that every Christmas. About her impulse to help and how so often the most generous among us have the least to give. About how baffling it is that in our communities that are filled with people who have far more than two dollars to shed, there are perhaps just as many who could desperately use them.
No, I’m uncertain why we tend to think about these issues more around this time of year, but I do think the annual gut check has some value, even if it would be great if it happened far more often.
May it serve as a reason for reflection this holiday season for all of us — a prompt that will get us to ask what we can give, collectively and individually, to those looking for a warm place to sit, and some humanity to go along with it.
Even if all we can spare is two dollars and a handful of nuts.
Tribune guest columnist Eli McCann.
Eli McCann is an attorney, writer and podcaster in Salt Lake City, where he lives with his husband, new baby and their two naughty (yet worshipped) dogs. You can find Eli on X, formerly known as Twitter, at @EliMcCann or at his personal website, www.itjustgetsstranger.com, where he tries to keep the swearing to a minimum so as not to upset his mother.
