Thirty-three years have passed and still I cannot listen to
"The Twelve Days of Christmas", that jolly old English carol, without an
overwhelming homesickness and a gnawing in the pit of my stomach. On
Christmas Eve night, 1964, alone in the Inland Hotel, I lay on my bed
watching the snowfall outside my window. In the park below stood a giant and
lavishly lit revolving Christmas tree. There was a Nativity scene with
manger, baby Jesus and "three kings of Orient are" that looked more like
drunken beatniks, their bug-eyed dromedaries in a lather for Bethlehem. The
Star of Wonder dangled like a broken kite from a telephone pole across the
street. And there was the offensively loud stereo system – hopelessly stuck
on one record:
"On the first day of Christmas
my true love gave to me
a partridge in a pear tree... "
A Currier and Ives scene it was not. I had quit my job at the mill the
day before and hadn't been paid. The ever gregarious Cobb, James and Eugene
had made some friends at a bar and were gone a-wassailing over in Calumet
City. It was my first Christmas away from home and all I had to eat was a
solitary saltine cracker.
From midnight until four in the morning, I listened to the wearisome
rendition of The Twelve Days of Christmas over and over until I had
memorized all twelve verses, frontward and backwards. Burying my head in my
pillow, I cursed every turtledove, calling bird, French hen and goose a-
laying right down to its pin feathers.
I thought of my family back home in Kentucky, my father, mother, three
brothers and sister. On this special night, they would be opening presents
by an open fire. They would be laughing and joking, gorging themselves on
holiday fruits and candies. I could almost smell my mother's oven, pungent
with the turkey baking all night for the Christmas Day feast.
But they had nothing on me. I had "two turtle doves, three French hens,
four calling birds and a partridge in a pear tree." All of which went well
with a saltine cracker.
—G.C. Compton, From Mountain Ink
