December Ritual

This story tells of an important part of my spiritual formation. It will appear in a book I hope to see in print one day.

As I look back over all my Christmas seasons, my ninth grade holiday is one of my favorite memories. My grandmother handed me some money and asked, “Would you please take the bus downtown and put this money in a Salvation Army kettle and bring back a copy of the War Cry Magazine. I’m not up to going myself this year. You went with me last year, so you know what to do.”

Family stories take on a life and significance of their own. They grow out of real events that are shaped in the retelling to define identity and meaning. Each year as I got older, my grandmother increasingly included me in her December Salvation Army ritual and told me more and more of the story of my grandfather’s life and how they married. I treasure this story, and now that I am a grandfather, I pass it to those who come after me. I have assembled the pieces my grandmother passed to me, knowing full well that she shaped them and that I have shaped them further.

My grandfather, Gustav Ragnar Erikson, grew up in a small fishing village on Marstrand, a Swedish island between the North Sea and the Baltic. Hjaylmar Nimrod Stenberg was his younger friend in the same village. In those days, life on Marstrand did not hold much future for these boys. At 16, Gustav got a job on a sailing ship and never returned to Sweden. A few years later, when Hjaylmar turned 16 he also went to sea and never returned to Sweden.

I was five years old when my grandfather died, but I distinctly remember the nautical tattoos on his forearms. Though she wouldn’t and maybe couldn’t tell me specific stories about my grandfather’s seafaring days, my grandmother definitely gave me the impression that he fit the stereotype of the hard-living, hard-drinking, hard-fighting sailors who manned sailing vessels. His adventures were not limited to the Atlantic, but included sailing around Cape Horn and plying the trade routes between California and Asia.

Once when his ship was in port in Oakland, California, my grandfather decided to stay. What he did and for how long, is a blank in the story until he and some of his friends decided to attend a Salvation Army tent meeting to heckle. They fortified themselves with a visit to a bar first, which apparently left their heckling ineffective.

When the Salvation Army people were cleaning up after the tent meeting, they found a young man sleeping off his drunk. The Salvation Army people took my grandfather under their wing and cared for him. One of them was a young woman. I don’t know who pursued whom or how their relationship developed, but they married. My grandmother never indicated that my grandfather walked the sawdust trail at one of those Salvation Army revivals, but he did become a new man. Drinking and fighting adventures were behind him.

This young couple had a son, and they settled in Oakland. Both wife and son died in the 1918 flu epidemic. Alone again, my grandfather sought companionship at the First Swedish Baptist Church of Oakland. There he met Annette Josephine Olson, Nettie to her friends and family, my grandmother. Some of her friends said to her, “Nettie, did you see that young widower in church? Now that your mother is gone, maybe you could marry him.”

My grandmother was the oldest of four sisters. After their father died, their sickly mother required continual care. As the oldest sister, that responsibility fell to my grandmother. Her younger sisters all left home and married. After her mother died, Nettie was available to marry but thought she was probably too old for that to be likely. I never heard much about my grandparents’ courtship, but I do have a single studio photograph of a very simple wedding.

After my grandparents married, they connected with one of my grandmother’s younger sisters Helen Amelia who had married a Swedish immigrant, Hjaylmar Stenberg. My sister and I knew him as Uncle Nick. My mother was born in 1920 and was the only child of either marriage. These two couples either lived together or within a short walk of each other the rest of their lives. They had a couple of stints in Fort Bragg, California, where Uncle Nick had a brother. Most of the time, they lived in Oakland. My mother did not think of herself so much as an only child, but as having four loving parents.

My grandfather died the year I started kindergarten, and my grandmother moved in with us. I’m sure she began her annual pilgrimages to a Salvation Army kettle the first December after my grandfather’s death. I remember my Dad offering to drive her downtown, but she refused and said she wanted to do this herself. I know I was less than 10 the first time she asked me to accompany her for this December ritual. As we rode the bus each year, this story unfolded in bits and pieces, not as a complete narrative.

Occasionally, I would ride the bus with my grandmother to visit the Chapel of the Chimes where my grandfather is interred. In the same side of the chapel are two niches each with a pair of bronze urns that look like antique books. One pair for my grandparents and the other for Aunt Helen and Uncle Nick. At the time, only the urn for my grandfather was occupied. On one of those visits, my grandmother walked with me to the adjacent Mountain View Cemetery. In one of the older sections that no longer received the same level of perpetual care as the active areas, she found the graves of my grandfather’s first wife and son. I was touched by the love and respect my grandmother had for her husband’s first wife and child.

Of course, my grandmother never knew them. As she passed the pieces of this story to me while riding the bus, she explained that making a donation at a Salvation Army kettle every December was her way of thanking this woman she never knew for her husband. When my grandmother was no longer able to ride the bus, even accompanied by a high school grandson, she sent me with bus fare and her donation to find a Salvation Army kettle downtown and bring her a War Cry Magazine. Even after I had my driver’s license I was expected to take the bus and not to include any other errands on this excursion.

In the half-century that has passed since those December bus rides with my grandmother, I have continued to find a Salvation Army kettle and make a donation every year. But there are changes. I no longer ride the bus downtown nor do I restrict the trip to that one purpose. I’ve lived in five different states since then. The function of downtown has been taken over by shopping centers. But Salvation Army kettles are easily accessible, and if the person ringing the bell at the kettle has time and is inclined to chat, I tell my grandparents’ story.

I appreciate the difference the Salvation Army makes in the lives of people who are facing disaster, struggling with homelessness and poverty, and recovering from addictions. Some like my grandfather who may not even be looking for help when they are out of control, but are surprised by a new life because of the Salvation Army. For several years when I was serving a church in New Jersey, I was the volunteer Salvation Army Human Services Secretary for our five townships.

 But for me, the December ritual at a Salvation Army kettle is personal. Like my grandmother, I pause to pay respect to a woman and a little boy who, in dying, led to the marriage of my grandfather and grandmother and the birth of my mother.