A Homemade Christmas

At times I write things that don't get published for a while, if ever. This is one of those stories waiting for a magazine or anthology home. For now, it makes a good blog post. 

I can’t remember the year, exactly, but it was sometime in the mid 1960’s. My family lived in Nigeria, West Africa because my parents were stationed there by the Christian mission they served. Nigeria was not an easy place to be in the 1960’s.

That decade started out hopeful when on October 1, 1960, Nigeria was granted its independence from Great Brittan. But hope crumbled in the subsequent years as tribal infighting increased and rumblings of war began. This fighting culminated in a tragic civil war known as the Biafran War. My family lived there during all of this—my physician father, my nurse mother, my two sisters, one brother, and me.

Like other missionaries, my parents usually brought with them, tucked away in the missionary barrels with all of their other personal items, at least some of the presents they would need for the various occasions over the three years they would be in Africa. But they assumed they would be able to also purchase other toys and other items in country. Nigeria’s larger cities like Lagos and Ibadan had British stores with many of the goods we were accustomed to in America. Most Christmases, my parents and other missionaries made trips to Ibadan and purchased gifts for each other and us children, which they gave us along with the one or two things they had brought with them. But that year, travel was restricted due to the unrest all around us.

What was a parent to do in a situation like that? 

Nonetheless, I remember that Christmas as one of the grandest I ever had. I woke up that Christmas morning to what seemed like a living room full of new toys! It felt to me like I had received more toys than I had ever received at any one time in my life. It was a magical morning; Christmas magic, I suppose. I can still remember looking around the room and seeing a new item of one kind or another seemingly everywhere. And what were these gifts? How had my parents solved the problem of not being able to travel and purchase gifts for their children?

That year, my parents had brought only a set of plastic dishes with them in their missionary barrels as their gift to my sisters and me. Those plastic dishes were all they had to offer their three daughters. Oh, they had brought other gifts, but these had already been given in the previous two years on the field. This year, the last year of their term, they had only one set of plastic dishes left. I do not know what they had thought they would be able to do but I assume they had planned on giving one of us those dishes and buying other gifts for the other two of us. But as it was, that set of plastic dishes was all they had. So, they improvised and made gifts, or had them made actually.

That morning before my bright, wide-open child’s eyes, I saw laying around my living room in various places; a small wooden sink and kitchen cabinet combination, a small wooden refrigerator with doors on hinges that opened and shut and shelves inside, a wooden stove with a door that opened just like a real stove, a miniature wooden table and four small chairs. These, it turned out had been made by the hospital carpenter using my dad’s design and then hand painted by my father. Sitting on the table were the plastic dishes and laying on the floor near these were three aprons, a small tablecloth, napkins, dish cloths, and a hot pad all made by my seamstress mother with material she had bought at the local market.

The gifts were for all three of us—both my sisters and me—but that didn’t matter to me at all. It all seemed so marvelous! My sisters and I shared a room, anyway. All three of us slept in one double bed. I, of course, got the middle since I was the middle sister. After we moved our toys to our room from the living room, we had every little girl’s dream of a bedroom. Our three baby dolls already had their spots in the room. We had one small wooden cradle that all the dolls laid in. That didn’t seem strange to us. They shared that bed just like we shared our bed. But now we had a table and four chairs so the dolls could sit at our little table instead of sleep in the cradle if we wanted to place them there. Against one wall now sat the toy kitchen sink-cabinet combination, stove, and refrigerator and in front of that we placed the table complete with a tablecloth on it. We stored the dish towels, and aprons on one of the shelves inside the cabinet. The dishes could be found anywhere—in the cabinet, in the refrigerator, in the sink, or on the table.

I didn’t feel like I was in a small mission house in a war-torn African country. I felt as though I was in the richest palace in the world. Surely no little girl anywhere had as many wonderful kitchen toys as my sisters and me!