By Roy Ockert Jr.
with lots of help from Pat Ockert
To make something good out of this crazy year, when we are separated not by choice but by reason, it struck me — in the middle of the night recently — that I should put together our family’s Christmas story. Using tools I’ve sharpened by not being near people, here is that story.
I’ve titled it “A Pandemic Christmas,” only because of the year in which it is created. Next year I’ll probably change the title so we can forget it.
Our family’s Christmas story begins in the fall of 1966, when two college journalism students fell in love. Pat’s first present to me was a portrait of herself, on which she wrote, “Love always, Pat.” As time passed, I learned that she really meant it.
Our two families had different Christmas traditions, at least in one important way. My mother, and her mother before her, always put up a large cut tree, then covered it with multi-colored lights, all sorts of ornaments, garlands and tinsel, lots of tinsel. Mother liked to decorate the house, and I put up my first string of outside lights before I finished high school. Pat’s family had the same tree for years — an aluminum thing that didn’t much look like a tree but with a rotating color wheel.
In our early years Pat fell in love with real trees and Christmas decorating, and that passion has grown over the years — much like my affinity for lights.
For that reason and others, we started planning a future together and got married on June 1, 1967, then traveled to Norman, Okla., where I would enter graduate school. We started in a small apartment but soon moved into a slightly larger one. Because we weren’t going to spend Christmas there, we didn’t buy a tree, but Pat brought home a small office tree — our first.
We left Norman on Dec. 23 and spent a couple of days at the Browning house. Then on Christmas Day we drove to Jonesboro and spent two days with the Montgomerys.That’s a practice we would follow many times over the years — Christmas Eve in Hot Springs, then off to Jonesboro for Christmas night there. One Christmas, many years later, the weather was so bad on our trip to Jonesboro that cars were sliding off the road. I stopped at Amagon and put my emergency tire chains on the car so we could finish the trip, and we finally arrived well after dark.
Our family expanded by one on July 5, 1968, and we moved to Magnolia not long after that. Toni Leigh experienced her first Christmas — at Hot Springs and Jonesboro.
In 1970 we moved to Jonesboro, which made Christmas celebrations a little easier for a time. One of our most memorable Christmases happened in 1972 — Toni was 4 and our newest addition, Lori Ann, not quite 4 months. My mother came to our house on Bernard that year, and on Christmas Eve we heard a knock at the door. I opened it and there stood Santa Claus — in cowboy boots no less.
Later I documented that event in a column for the Batesville Guard, and much later, after I had returned to Jonesboro as editor of The Sun, I learned who played Santa for that night. Unfortunately, he had passed away, but I went to see his widow, who said he had kept a reprint of my column on his refrigerator for years.
I’ve never had the build or voice to play Santa, but I tried in 1973. My students at ASU planned a Christmas party, and I agreed to hand out gifts. So I rented a Santa suit and gave it a whirl. I tried it out on Lori, who unfortunately was pretty scared as the picture shows. She got over that by the next year, though.
We moved to Batesville in 1975 and had some great Christmases there. But my favorites were after we bought a house on Liberty Lane and the Montgomerys built a house next door. Toni and Lori would both “leave the nest” while we lived there, but they got to spend more time with Grandpa and Mema for a while.
During those years my mother, by then a widow, and my brother Kenny often came to spend Christmas with us. Grandma’s arrival was eagerly awaited by the kids. She loved Christmas so much, and loved giving presents even more, that she would max out her credit cards in the months leading up to Christmas, then spend most of the next year paying off the debt.
As an accountant, she always tried to even things out. If Kenny asked for one thing, she would have to get me something else. Then if it cost a little more, she would get something else for Kenny, and so on. The same thing applied to our daughters.
After all her shopping, she would load up her Buick and drive to Batesville. Kenny and I would then dutifully unload everything, and suddenly our living room was filled to then brim around the tree.
This only got worse as our family grew.
We lost our patriarch J.Y. a few months after the Christmas of 1988, and what a shame that our grandkids never got a chance to know him.
Olivia made her grand entrance in the Christmas of 1992, and things have never been the same since then. To everyone’s surprise, she soon liked me best — at least for a while. They should have known from experience that little girls like silly Grandpas.
The twins arrived early but not early enough for the Christmas of 1995. That summer of ’95 I became managing editor of The Courier at Russellville, and Pat stayed behind to close down our photography studio. That took much longer than expected, and I came back almost every weekend, or Pat came to Russellville.
The Christmas of 1995 was thrown together. Nothing illustrates that better than the Christmas tree I “borrowed” — one of the last left on the abandoned Presbyterian lot. Toni couldn’t travel, and I had to go back to Russellville on Christmas Day. So Pat celebrated with Grandma, Mema, Lori and Olivia. The next weekend Pat and I, along with Lori and Olivia, drove to Lowell for a Patton Christmas and baby shower.
Eventually, we bought a house on the London Mountain, a short drive from Russellville, and we were reunited in time to have a big family celebration in 1996, the first Christmas for Morgan and Michaela. That turned out to be one for the ages — magical, as Pat has called it. She didn’t think so for a time.
She woke up on the morning of Christmas Eve, feeling a cold coming on. With a full house and a big dinner to prepare, she headed to the kitchen, only to find that a pipe had broken, releasing a waterworks. Luckily, we found a plumbing company that could send repairmen that afternoon.
While the plumbers worked, we sat around the tree in the living room, and Olivia dubbed them the “Sugar Plums,” which delighted them. Pretty soon, we were caroling, and Grandma worried aloud that we’d have to pay double since they were subjected to our singing. After all that, dinner was city-style — 9 p.m.
That didn’t finish our day, though. After Olivia and the Pattons went to bed, Lori, Pat, Grandma and I went downstairs to work on the present Grandma had brought — a log cabin-style dollhouse … which had to be put together … and had a million pieces.
We measured, cut and glued till exhaustion overtook us in early morning, leaving the house still unfinished. We explained to Olivia that Santa asked Pat and me to keep it for a couple of weeks to finish it. She bought that and called it a new family “earloom.”
That earloom, finished but a little worse for wear, is now in the Ockert Museum downstairs, waiting to be claimed by its rightful owner.
The next year was even more fun — no flood anyway — because Morgan and Michaela were almost 2 and much more into Santa Claus and presents. Olivia got a karaoke machine with a microphone and entertained us with her singing, as well as the marriage of her dolls. Who can forget the “awful wedded husband?”
We spent one more Christmas in the London house, then bought the one we had wanted from the beginning — on Golden Pond Drive in Russellville. We moved Pat’s mother, in declining health, to Russellville in 1998, and she was able to be a part of our Christmas celebrations again. In 1999 the Pattons wanted to be at home for Santa’s visit on Christmas morning so we began looking for earlier or later times for a family gathering. We had an early celebration in 2000, and it’s a good thing we did because an ice storm hit Arkansas on Christmas Day. Many people were iced in for several days.
Of all the houses we’ve lived in, the one on Golden Pond was probably Pat’s favorite because it had a full-length front porch and a beautiful rustic look outside. Inside it had an open floor plan for the large living room, kitchen and dining room, which made it ideal for large groups. The previous owner, apparently a Christmas lights fanatic, left 20-25 strings of white lights to me. In the 20 years since then, I’ve almost used them up. My family kept me furnished with new lights for a time.
Leaving Russellville was a bittersweet experience, in part because of the Golden Pond house, but that’s what we did in 2001, when I got the call to be editor of The Jonesboro Sun, which my company had bought. While the negotiations were under way for my transfer, Mema suffered another stroke, or series of mini-strokes, and passed away on Feb. 10. That certainly complicated the move, but Pat and I welcomed it as a chance to go home. Mema would have loved it, too, if she had lived to see it. I started at The Sun on April 2 while Pat stayed in Russellville for a couple months to begin the estate work and sell the house.
Our new house on Spring Valley Drive in south Jonesboro would then host our family celebrations off and on for about 15 years. It was a larger house, with more rooms but a small living room. Its 2-story design was ideal for outside lights, and eventually we were putting up two Christmas trees — a real one and an artificial one.
Somewhere along the way, maybe even before we got back to Jonesboro, a new tradition broke out — the paper fight. After the first round or two, the real fighters learned to squirrel away wrapping paper as we opened presents — ammunition for the coming war.
My Mother drove to Jonesboro for the first two Christmas gatherings, but the first time she got lost and the second time she ran off the wet road at Gibson’s Switch just outside town. She wasn’t hurt, nor was her car, but a state trooper called me and suggested I come get her because she was too shaken to drive.
In 2003 Mother was diagnosed with colon cancer, and soon afterward she suffered a mini-stroke. So we held the next three or four gatherings at Lori’s house in Bryant. I would go get Mother at Hot Springs and take her home afterward. She still wanted to shop for everybody but couldn’t do that alone so I’d go to Hot Springs in early December and take her to the mall. One year I got there and found she hadn’t put up a tree, but I got a little artificial one and each year put it up for her.
Eventually, I had to do the shopping, and she couldn’t travel. That meant holding a mini-gathering at her house somewhere around Christmas, The best one was in 2007, when we rented a house at the Alpine Inn on Lake Hamilton, with Lori, Olivia and the Pattons joining us. On the first day we all went to Mother’s house and did some badly needed clean-up, fix-up work. The next day we brought her to the inn for a family dinner.
In 2012 she suffered an episode that left her an invalid. After that she stayed with Toby and Vicky and had home health care. I retired from The Sun in 2012, which made it easier for me to help with her needs. Even as her condition deteriorated, she still delighted in buying Christmas presents — giving me directions for the shopping.
I wasn’t sure she’d make it through the holidays of 2015 so I went down there on Christmas Day and stayed overnight. She died on Dec. 27, just short of her 91st birthday.We had around-Christmas gatherings in the Spring Valley house for a few more years and one or two in our Alabama Road house. But a full-family celebration has become more difficult as our daughters and grandkids got busier, more important and-or moved further away.
Pat and I have become accustomed to celebrating Christmas as we did in the beginning — together. This year’s it’s necessary for the sake of our own health and that of everyone else. But the wonders of technology make this gathering possible, even if we do miss the hugs … and the paper fight. Hopefully, better days are ahead. Nonetheless, we still have a treasure chest of memories.
Merry Christmas to all and to all a better 2021!