By Jeff Hampton
“We’re never doing this again,” Charlie shouted at Clara as he stood with his arms wrapped around the metal pole of the tent, bracing hard against the sharp, wet wind.
“It seemed like a good idea,” Clara shouted back, holding tightly to the pole across from him.
Indeed, it had seemed like a good idea back in September when they signed up to show and sell their handcrafted wood jewelry boxes at the outdoor Christmas market on the county square. They were no strangers to holiday markets, but they had always been indoors – in school gyms and community centers where everything and everyone was safe and warm and dry. But when they heard that the Clifford County chapter of the Sweet Adelines was sponsoring an outdoor market to raise funds for music scholarships – and when they heard how big it would be and how many people it would attract from throughout the region – they jumped at the chance to have a booth.
The day started out promising enough. It was sunny and unseasonably warm. Setup had gone without a hitch, and when the gates opened at nine o’clock, the people had come pouring in as hoped for. What’s more, it seemed like most of them had come with long Christmas shopping lists and money to spend.
Charlie’s and Clara’s boxes were moving well, with Charlie having to go back to the truck twice to replenish their inventory. Oh, there were the usual irritations – the vendors who scooched their booths out over the painted lines to get a little extra exposure, the repetitive banter and cackle from a woman across the aisle who was too amused by her own joke about her crochet pillows, the customers who stopped only to ask directions to the restrooms, the children who came by over and over again to grab peppermints from their candy bowl. But mostly people behaved.
“There really is a true spirit of Christmas in the air,” Clara smiled and said after a particularly pleasant conversation and transaction with a shopper.
Indeed, things were going smoothly, and Charlie was noting at three o’clock that they only had two hours to go, when clouds began to float in from the north, and volunteers from the Sweet Adelines circulated among the vendors with news that a storm had broken off from an eastbound front and was headed south toward town.
“It shouldn’t be a problem, but you might want to secure your goods just in case,” they said.
Charlie and Clara were busy doing exactly that when a gust of chilly wind came whistling around the top of the courthouse tower and down the center of Pecan Street. Charlie watched with caution as the tents shivered one after another down the row until the wind reached theirs. Their tent shook and bucked and then settled back down again as the wind moved on down the line.
Clara was just at the end of a long sigh of relief when they heard a whistling sound and watched as a large Christmas wreath adorned with jingle bells frisbeed into their booth and cleared off their table. And then the wind swooped in seemingly from all directions, the air was filled with a chilly spray that coated everything, and the entire market was in chaos. Tents lifted into the sky and then out of sight, followed by everything that had not been packed away.
Charlie and Clara watched it all as they held tightly to their tent poles. The sky was full of candles, knitted dog sweaters, packets of homemade chili mix and peanut brittle, boxes of home milled soap, yard banners, pizza pans, cartons of wrapping paper and bows. And mixed into it all were Christmas ornaments of red and green: wreathes and garlands and wooden ornaments. Clara “oohed” out load as she watched several Santas in various stages of liftoff, orbit, and re-entry.
And then just as quickly as it had come, the rain stopped falling and the wind quit blowing and everything that had been airborne came falling back to earth. Charlie and Clara were glad to still have their tent for shelter as one item after another landed on their roof with a dull thud.
Then, when all was quiet and calm again, the shoppers and vendors began roaming the streets in search of their merchandise. But while everyone found something, nobody seemed to locate their own stuff. A Sweet Adeline in a red apron with a bull horn directed that all the orphaned products be brought to the bottom of the courthouse steps, and so a sort of lost and found began to form.
Next to that pile, a second collection began to take shape: a repository of nativity characters. Surely there was a merchant who would claim those, but when one of the Sweet Adelines checked her vendor list, she shook her head.
“Nope. Nobody here was selling nativities. Must have blown in from one of the neighborhoods,” she said.
As it was, none of the nativity pieces matched either. There were flat plywood shepherds, inflated balloon wise men, a translucent plastic Mary lit from within, and a Joseph made of painted polystyrene. A couple of shoppers took it upon themselves to arrange the characters in a typical nativity way, but they were missing a Christ Child. Seeing that omission, another shopper rolled her wagon to where the manger would normally be, and one of the quilters lined it with a small lap quilt. And then a little girl gently placed a porcelain baby doll that her grandmother had purchased for her from an antique dealer.
Everyone just stood and stared, not sure what to do next, until the man who had been selling tooled leather guitar straps and belts came with his guitar and began singing Christmas carols. The Sweet Adelines joined in, of course, while someone dug through the pile and handed out candles. A woman who had been selling incense lit her candle and the flame was passed from person to person as more people added their voices.
About that time an engine from the fire department rolled up. The firefighters jumped out expecting they would be helping the injured and hurting, but instead they found the people in full chorus. They joined in too, and after a round of “Hark the Herald” and “Little Town of Bethlehem” and “Silent Night,” it was getting dark and time for everyone to pack up and go home.
One of the Sweet Adelines pointed to the pile of merchandise that nobody had claimed and asked, “What do we do with all this?”
It was quiet for a moment, and then the fire captain had an idea. “We’ll take it to the shelter down the street.” The vendors and shoppers pitched in and helped load everything on the fire truck and waved as it rolled away.
Charlie and Clara folded up their tent and boxed up the little inventory they had left. As they drove to the exit and stopped, they looked at each other for a moment, nodded, and then Charlie lowered his window and said to the Sweet Adeline handling the gate, “Merry Christmas. See you next year.”