By Frances Stebbins
Going to church on Christmas Eve was never part of my early life, but spending at least part of Christmas Day with my deceased father’s family always was.
Being Christmas Eve, or a day before when this paper comes to you, it seems a good time to remember how my custom of keeping the second most holy day in the Christian year – the first being Easter – came about.
Last week I reflected on the music of the season. In my teen years it was the custom of my mother and me to join in carol singing at dusk in front of the courthouse in the town of Orange, Va. Perhaps 100 people or so gathered there to enjoy familiar Nativity hymns. Piano accompaniment was by a woman active in the Baptist church who also played for the Lions Club.
At home our cedar Christmas tree had been up for about three days. Mama and I rose early to open presents because we had to catch a train or bus to take us to Charlottesville to spend much of the day at the home of one of my adult first cousins. Married to a professor of architecture at “the University” (of Virginia) she had a home large enough to accommodate perhaps a dozen members of the descendants of the Stringfellow family.
The professor was of Polish background and a Roman Catholic; his wife, who was my cousin, had grown up in a rural part of Albemarle County and was a non-observant Episcopalian. Husband and two sons had been to Mass the night before. Growing up in this religiously mixed family left its scars on the four children and only one, the youngest, would take her faith seriously.
But to return to Christmas Eve and church, my first recollection of being in one on Christmas Eve came in 1951 five months after my late husband Charlie and I were married. We were living in a basement apartment in Petersburg, Va., with both of us working for newspapers. He, being not only a man and World War II veteran, but having news experience, was employed by the city’s daily, “The Petersburg Progress-Index.” I, in my first job as editor of a regional weekly, “The Southside Virginia News,” had less status, but I carefully edited to the style I had been taught in college all the contributed material sent in.
We went out to eat on Christmas Eve after I had finished a busy day “putting the paper to bed.” Then something prompted me to suggest we attend a late service at one of the many churches of our common faith.
(Interestingly, in the 18 months we lived in one of Virginia’s oldest cities, I wrote a story about a precocious young organist named Richard Cummins who was already playing for a church in his hometown. Years later, we’d connect again in Roanoke when he was the admired and longtime musician on the staff of Greene Memorial United Methodist Church downtown.).
I remember little about that Christmas Eve service, but it marked the beginning of my religious observance as an adult. When Charlie and I took jobs on the Roanoke daily afternoon paper, we were drawn to attend a small new Episcopal parish on our first Easter in 1953.
In time, I joined the choir of the little Williamson Road parish. Rectors came and went since the several small newer congregations in that neighborhood were something of a training ground for clergy. Eventually, one started opening the church for worship late on Christmas Eve. I can recall exiting the building at midnight singing “Hark, the Herald Angels Sing” into the cold darkness.
By this time our family had grown to five. My loving aunts and uncles, several of whom had shared in my infant Baptism at our family’s country place, had moved on to the next world, but the habit of traveling to be with relatives on Christmas Day remained too strong with me to be broken.
Charlie had an elderly aunt and her husband in Clifton Forge. Devout churchgoers, they were childless but welcomed the Roanoke nephew and his young family. Unfortunately, this aunt I can only describe charitably as “silly.” Our children hated these enforced trips on Christmas afternoon; my adult daughter now recalls them with great distaste.
Carrying on family traditions can be counter productive.
After becoming empty-nesters, Charlie and I moved to my current church in Salem in 1987, and two years later we became residents of the historic courthouse town. In our new church, too, I joined the choir, and for more than 25 years sang with the late Judy Paxton, who died earlier this month of complications of COVID 19.
For years to come this Christmas Eve and Day will bring different memories.
