Author Ed Cullen shares his short story "Christmas Calling" for the holiday.

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"Christmas Calling"

Saiward Pharr/WRKF Author Ed Cullen

The Christmas I was nine a large cardboard box appeared beneath our tree on Christmas Eve. I'd kept a careful inventory of the presents half hidden by the fragrant branches. Some intuitive Christmas power told me there was a shortwave radio inside the box. I knew about long-distance radio listening. I'd taken to falling asleep with the earpiece of a crystal radio jammed into one ear. On cold, clear nights, voices rode down the skies from St. Louis, Cincinnati and Nashville.

"It's a shortwave radio, isn't it?" I asked my father, who looked at me as though I were a talking cat.

"It's not a shortwave radio," he said. "It's jelly."

He turned to my mother. "Why does he think there's a shortwave radio in that box?"

"Because he wants it to be," my mother said.

I opened the cardboard box shortly after dawn.

Inside were 24 jars of grape jelly, each jar in its own waxy brown cell, a gift from one of my dad's friends. Oh, monstrous betrayal!

"You told me it was a shortwave radio," I wailed.

"I told you it was jelly," my father said. `You said it was a radio."

The jelly radio taught me the power of anticipation and desire. I'm certain that if I'd wished for half an hour longer my mental energy would have turned sugar into circuitry.

In the sensory carousel of Christmas recollections, there is the smell of the tires on my first bicycle and the cool touch of sharp metal girders lifted from a red, tin Erector set box.

Close my eyes and I see the inside of Wellan's Department Store in Alexandria, hear the whoosh of brass message cylinders hurtling through pneumatic tubes, hear the babble of customers and clerks and the ding-ding of elevator doors opening.

Cars passing in the December street call to mind the Christmas Eve I sneaked into the living room to fight sleep by counting the infrequent cars passing our house. I was waiting for my mother to come home from her department store job.

Finally, there was the sound of her key in the lock and the sudden smell of her in the living room. When she finished fussing about my being up so late, I made her tell me about the Christmas Eve that Louie Wellan found her crying at the foundation garments counter.

"I've told you that story before," she said.

"Tell it, again."

"It was late Christmas Eve. The store was closing. Everyone was putting on coats and hats and wishing each other Merry Christmas.When I looked in my purse, the little envelope with my pay was gone. I looked under the counter, on the floor, in the wastepaper basket. All I could think was that someone had stolen it. I was sitting on a stool with my elbows on the counter crying when Mr. Wellan walked up."

Sometimes, it was Mr. Wellan and sometimes it was Louie Wellan. But always there was respect in my mother's voice when she said the name of one of the store's owners.

My mother loved Mr. Wellan. She told me that if I ever heard anyone say mean things about Jews to think of Mr. Wellan and the second pay envelope he didn't have to give her that Christmas Eve.

The year I was 14, my mother gave me a book called "Dragon Run." It was a mystery book for young, serious readers. The Hardy Boys, even "The Shortwave Mystery," held little for me after "Dragon Run."

Between that Christmas and the next, my mother died. In most ways that mattered, childhood was over.

Many Christmases later, my children grown, I opened a present I was sure was a book and found to my astonishment a copy of "Dragon Run." For years, my wife and daughter had ransacked book stores, antique stores and, finally, the internet to find a copy of the long out-of-print book. Holding "Dragon Run"
in my hands, I felt the crush and exhilaration of so many Christmases remembered.

Lying warm in my bed these December nights, I hear the branches of an old yew tree squeaking against the cold, clouded windows of my bedroom. In that briefest interval between consciousness and slumber, I am a child listening for Christmas - calling, calling, calling on freezing night air - as though through the whistle crack of a shortwave radio.

(c) Ed Cullen