Commentary
Over the years people have asked in that incredulous voice, how are the winters out there? Isn’t it freezing? You get away for a few months, right?
Every Christmas on Martha’s Vineyard is an old fashioned Christmas, even though the observance came relatively late to New England. The three youths who advanced to the front of a platform in an Island school and sang with voices hardly breaking at all, We Three Kings of Israel Are, were pioneers.
'Twas Christmas Eve and Santa Claus was readying for his trip to see his Vineyard friends, of course, but traveling not by ship, nor ferry boat nor freight boat nor on the Island Queen. He comes by air each Christmastide thanks to his reindeer team.
The rock and the general — those are the words I use to describe my paternal grandparents. Herbert and Claire Mercier, married for 63 years, created a life on Cooke street in Edgartown.
I woke up wearing a hospital gown. The paper napkin tie-on dress was a faded robin’s egg blue, dotted with orange bloodstains from the burns that turned into inch-thick scabs on my stomach and chest.
"Christmas is coming! Christmas is coming!" That’s how my grandmother, Addie Crist, would greet me when she came to visit my parents and me for the holidays.