From her first birthday two years ago to the one we celebrate today, this little girl has been the icing on our cake whenever we see her. For Pretty and me, she is the gift that keeps on giving.
Molly’s first birthday cake (2023)
(maternal grandmother Gigi laughs at Molly’s first cake experience)
when you’re three years old, you can use your hands
big sister Ella and Mama Caroline help with gifts as Daddy keeps watch
Molly consoles her best friend who wondered why none of the gifts were hers
what could possibly be better for a party than the 2024 bounce house?
(two-year-old Molly and four-year-old Ella in their bare feet had fun!)
a petting zoo in the backyard!
the goat was in charge of gymnastics
Molly, Molly, how much do Nana and Naynay love thee? Let me count the ways – too many to count. You are priceless.
my early years in my hometown of rural Richards, Texas
(circa 1949 – when I was three years old)
(this picture should have been a clue, but my grandmother ignored it)
a birthday party dress made by my grandmother (circa 1951)
my grandmother made this dress and a picture postcard of me
for her family Easter card in 1949
Bless her heart. My grandmother tried and tried to reshape my fashions which upon reflection she probably hoped would reshape my life. One of the most dreaded phrases my mother ever spoke to me – the one that made me cringe-was “Your grandmother is making you a new dress and needs you to walk down to her house to try it on. No arguments, no whining, just go.”
I absolutely hated to stand on her little stool while she endlessly pinned away to make sure the pattern she bought from a grand clothing store in much bigger town Navasota fit perfectly on my small body. She pulled, tugged here and there, made me turn around as she measured whatever cloth she had purchased when she bought the pattern. I prayed silently that the aroma I smelled was her pineapple fried pies…the only possible redemption from the hell of being poked and prodded for a new dress I didn’t want to wear.
My grandmother Betha Day Robinson Morris and I lived within shouting distance of each other in the tiny town (pop. about 500) of Richards until my dad found a new job that took us out of the place I called home when I was 13 years old. Our new home in Brazoria was less than two hours from Richards so we came back every other week for most of my teenage years. Distance did not deter my grandmother from her sewing, however.
She usually managed to have something for me to try on whenever we visited. I finally surrendered to her passion for sewing because as I grew older I came to understand sewing was an important part of her life, but to this day I dread hearing Pretty say she brought something home for me to try on.
my grandmother surveys her granddaughters
before Easter Sunday church services in 1963
I was 17 years old and wearing a dress my grandmother made for me
while my younger cousin Melissa modeled her store-bought outfit
My grandmother continued to sew for me until I was in my twenties. Every Christmas she wrapped a large box in her best wrapping paper and favorite bow saved from the previous Christmas to give to me. I always opened with feigned surprise at the dress she made for me to wear to church and praised her for being able to still find the perfect pattern and material for me even when I wasn’t there to try it on.
I’ll never forget the last time I opened a gift of clothing she made for me. She had made a pants suit – unbelievable. I could see she was pleased with herself for breaking from the dress tradition she wanted me to wear to making the pants she now understood would forever be my choice of clothes. The year was 1968 – I was 22 years old – my grandmother would have been 55. The pants suit represented a rite of passage for both of us.
Unfortunately, I never could bring myself to wear the pants suit which was made with a hideous polyester fabric and a horrible bright green and white large zig zag pattern. I couldn’t bring myself to wear it, but I carried it with me around the country wherever I moved for the next 30 years. I would carefully hang it in my closet as a daily reminder of the love my grandmother gave me for as long as she lived.
My grandmother Betha was a flawed individual but what I wouldn’t give today to hear my mother say “Sheila Rae, your grandmother is making you a new dress and wants you to try it on. No arguments, no whining, just go.”
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Those were the days, my friends – and now we have the opportunities to create new memories for our granddaughters we celebrate not only during the holiday season but also whenever we see them. What will they remember? I wonder.
Yes, Virginia you’ve probably read this story at least six times if you’ve been with me for many moons. This Christmas story is one of my favorites from Deep in the Heart: A Memoir of Love and Longing that was published in 2007 by Red Letter Press. The book’s been out of print for sixteen years, but there’s something about this little girl’s struggles for authenticity in her life that make it universally appropriate in any season. Dedicated to all little girls who struggle to be themselves.
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“Dear Santa Claus, how are you? I am fine.
I have been pretty good this year. Please bring me a pair
of boxing gloves for Christmas. I need them.
Your friend, Sheila Rae Morris”
“That’s a good letter,” my maternal grandmother I called Dude said. She folded it and placed it neatly in the envelope. “I’ll take it to the post office tomorrow and give it to Miss Sally Hamilton to mail for you. Now, why do you need these boxing gloves?”
“Thank you so much, Dude. I hope he gets it in time. All the boys I play with have boxing gloves. They say I can’t box with them because I’m a girl and don’t have my own gloves. I have to get them from Santa Claus.”
“I see,” she said. “I believe I can understand the problem. I’ll take care of your letter for you.”
Several days later it was Christmas Eve. That was the night we opened our gifts with both families. This year our little group of Dude, Mama, Daddy, Uncle Marion, Uncle Toby and I walked to my paternal grandparents’ house across the dirt road and down the hill from ours. With us, we took the Christmas box of See’s Chocolate and Nuts Candies that Dude’s sister Aunt Orrie who lived in California sent every year, plus all the gifts for everyone. The only child in me didn’t like to share the candy, but it wouldn’t be opened until we could offer everyone a piece. Luckily, most everyone else preferred Ma’s divinity or her date loaf.
The beverage for the party was a homemade green punch. My Uncle Marion had carried Ginger Ale and lime sherbet with him. He mixed that at Ma’s in her fine glass punch bowl with the 12 cups that matched. You knew it was a special night if Ma got out her punch bowl. The drink was frothy and delicious. The perfect liquid refreshment with the desserts. I was in heaven, and very grownup.
When it was time to open the gifts, we gathered in the living room around the Christmas tree, which was ablaze with multi-colored blinking bubble lights. Ma was in total control of the opening of the gifts and instructed me to bring her each gift one at a time so she could read the names and anything else written on the tag. She insisted that we keep a slow pace so that all would have time to enjoy their surprises.
Really, there were few of those. Each year the men got a tie or shirt or socks or some combination. So the big surprise would be the color for that year. The women got a scarf or blouse or new gloves for church. Pa would bring out the Evening in Paris perfume for Ma he had raced across the street to Mr. McAfee’s Drug Store to buy when he closed the barber shop, just before the drug store closed.
The real anticipation was always the wrapping and bows for the gifts. They saved the bows year after year and made a game of passing them back and forth to each other like old friends. There would be peals of laughter and delight as a bow that had been missing for two Christmases would make a mysterious re-appearance. Ma and Dude entertained themselves royally with the outside of the presents. The contents were practical and useful for the adults every year.
My gifts, on the other hand, were more fun. Toys and clothes combined the practical with the impractical. Ma would make me a dress to wear to school and buy me a doll of some kind. Daddy and Pa would give me six-shooters or a bow and arrows or cowboy boots and hats. Dude always gave me underwear.
This year Uncle Marion had brought me a jewelry box from Colorado. He had gone out there to work on a construction job and look for gold. I loved the jewelry box. Unfortunately, I didn’t have any jewelry; equally unfortunate, he hadn’t found any gold.
“Well, somebody needs to go home and get to bed so that Santa Claus can come tonight,” Daddy said at last. “I wonder what that good little girl thinks she’s going to get.” He smiled.
“Boxing gloves,” I said immediately. “I wrote Santa a letter to bring me boxing gloves. Let’s go home right now so I can get to bed.”
Everybody got really quiet.
Daddy looked at Mama. Ma looked at Pa. Uncle Marion and Uncle Toby looked at the floor. Dude looked at me.
“Okay, then, sugar. Give Ma and Pa a kiss and a big hug for all your presents. Let’s go, everybody, and we’ll call it a night so we can see what Santa brings in the morning,” Daddy said.
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“Is it time to get up yet?” I whispered to Dude. What was wrong with her? She was always the first one up every morning. Why would she choose Christmas Day to sleep late?
“I think it’s time,” she whispered back. “I believe I heard Saint Nick himself in the living room a little while ago. Go wake up your mama and daddy so they can turn on the Christmas tree lights for you to see what he left. Shhh. Don’t wake up your uncles.”
I climbed over her and slipped quietly past my sleeping Uncle Marion and crept through the dining room to Mama and Daddy’s bedroom. I was trying to not make any noise. I could hear my Uncle Toby snoring in the middle bedroom.
“Daddy, Mama, wake up,” I said softly to the door of their room. “Did Santa Claus come yet?” Daddy opened the door, and he and Mama came out. They were smiling happily and took me to the living room where Mama turned on the tree lights. I was thrilled with the sight of the twinkling lights as they lit the dark room. Mama’s tree was so much bigger than Ma’s and was perfectly decorated with ornaments of every shape and size and color. The icicles shimmered in the glow of the lights. There were millions of them. Each one had been meticulously placed individually by Mama. Daddy and I had offered to help but had been rejected when we were seen throwing the icicles on the tree in clumps rather than draping them carefully on each branch.
I held my breath. I was afraid to look down. When I did, the first thing I saw was the Roy Rogers gun and holster set. Two six-shooters with gleaming barrels and ivory-colored handles. Twelve silver bullets on the belt.
“Wow,” I exclaimed as I took each gun out of the holster and examined them closely. “These look just like the ones Roy uses, don’t they, Daddy?”
“You bet,” he said. “I’m sure they’re the real thing. No bad guys will get past you when you have those on. Main Street will be safe again.” He and Mama laughed together at that thought.
The next thing my eyes rested on was the Mr. And Mrs. Potato Head game. I wasn’t sure what that was when I picked it up, but I could figure it out later. Some kind of game to play when the cousins came later for Christmas lunch.
I moved around the tree and found another surprise. There was a tiny crib with three identical baby dolls in it. They were carefully wrapped in two pink blankets and one blue one. I stared at them.
“Triplets,” Mama said with excitement. “Imagine having not one, not two, but three baby dolls at once. Two girls and a boy. Isn’t that fun? Look, they have a bottle you can feed them with. See, their little mouths can open. You can practice feeding them. Aren’t they wonderful?”
I nodded. “Yes, ma’am. They’re great. I’ll play with them later this afternoon.” I looked around the floor and crawled to look behind the tree.
“Does Santa ever leave anything anywhere else but here?” I asked. Daddy and Mama looked at each other and then back at me.
“No, sweetheart,” Daddy said. “This is all he brought this year. Don’t you like all of your presents?”
“Oh, yes, I love them all,” I said with the air of a diplomat. “But, you know, I had asked him for boxing gloves. I was really counting on getting them. All the boys have them, and I wanted them so bad.”
“Well,” Mama said. “Santa Claus had the good common sense not to bring a little girl boxing gloves. He knew that only little boys should be fighting each other with big old hard gloves. He also realized that lines have to be drawn somewhere. He would go along with toy guns, even though that was questionable. But he had to refuse to allow boxing gloves this Christmas or any Christmas.”
I looked at Daddy. My heart sank.
“Well, baby,” he said with a rueful look. “I’m afraid I heard him say those very words.”
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In 2008, the year following publication of Deep, one of my best friends Billy Frye gave me a pair of boxing gloves for Christmas – better late than never, Santa. I was sixty-two years old. Billy Frye understood.
Last year (2022) Pretty’s sister Darlene and her partner Dawne gave me a brand new pair of boxing gloves because they also loved this story. Darlene asked me if I thought my mother would have permitted boxing gloves in our home when I originally asked Santa for them as a child if they were pink, and Pretty spoke up for me. I doubt it, she said, but she did always love for Sheila to wear pink.
Dear Ella and Molly, once upon a time long ago your Nana and Naynay shared a special Christmas that was the beginning of their love that led them to you.
Here’s a blast from the past – December, 2015 – nine years ago I published this piece about Pretty’s gift that year of my favorite Christmas music. While we no longer attend the sing-alongs in church together, Alexa is more than happy to share the Messiah with me during the Christmas season every year. I sing along now with the London Philharmonic Orchestra and Choir, but the music carries me to memories of the passion beginning to stir in a Baptist church in South Carolina twenty-four years ago…
Teresa gave me the best gift of the holiday season last night when she took me to a Sing-Along Messiah concert at the Washington Street United Methodist Church where I sang along with a packed church audience of other “Messiah” lovers who were mostly white-haired like me but had a good mixture of younger voices that gave me a feeling of hope for many more years of these sing-alongs.
It was a special night for us because the first official “date” we had fifteen years ago this Christmas was to go to a presentation of Handel’s Messiah by the choir and orchestra at the Park Street Baptist Church here in Columbia. I remember how nervous I was to ask her to go, although we had been friends for many years and done lots of things together like going to Panther football games several times, eating lunch frequently to discuss Guild business, meeting at my office for work on Guild mailing lists. We had been friends and activists in our community for seven years, but now things were different because we were both “available.” Our other long-term relationships were over.
Teresa laughs now because she said she didn’t know I was asking her out on a “date” when I asked her to go hear the Messiah. She says she was surprised that I asked her to go because neither of us went to church – and even more surprised when I suggested we go to dinner afterwards since I hadn’t said a word about that in my original “ask.” She was busy. She had to mail her Christmas cards. She had her fourteen-year-old son Drew to get dinner for, she said when I tried to prolong our evening. I must have looked so disappointed that she took pity on me.
Hm. Why don’t you go to the post office with me to mail my cards and then we can get a pizza to take home to Drew? Sure, I’d said, as my dream of a romantic dinner evaporated right there in her car in front of the Post Office on Assembly Street while she rummaged through her large purse looking for stamps for her cards. Before I knew it, I was sitting in Teresa’s living room eating a pepperoni pizza with her and her son watching her wrap Christmas presents. Her dog Annie stared at me from the safety of her vantage point under the coffee table. I stayed way too long.
The music last night transported me to the many wonderful places I’d performed Handel’s Messiah as a chorus member and soloist – even director in cities from Seattle, Washington to Fort Worth, Texas to Cayce and Columbia, South Carolina. I had always loved this music that symbolized Christmas for me whenever and wherever I’d heard it. Last night, however, I found those memories as fuzzy as the notes on the alto lines were as I tried my best to keep pace with the sing- along.
The most magical place the music took me last night? The living room of a little house on Wessex Lane where I sat eating pizza with a woman and her son. The most vivid memory? This was the night I realized I was falling in love with my best friend. Now that’s a memory to cherish.
I wish you all the hope for peace that this season offers and the joys of your favorite sounds of the season, but most of all, I wish you love.
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My dearest Molly and Ella, may you find someone special to share the music in your hearts.
Today we celebrate the one, the only, the remarkable Pretty for her addition of a new family member that gives us an even number Four, a quartet, to our family with the odd number Three for the past five years. Neither trio nor quartet came with music, however.
We’re talking bionic knees at our house, and then there were four following Pretty’s knee replacement on November 11th., Veterans Day in America which was a holiday for some workers but not for the busy medical personnel and staff at Midlands Orthopedics and Neurosurgery. This was Pretty’s second knee replacement, but the first one had been in either 2015 or 2016 – honestly, so long ago that neither of us could remember the year – she was fifty-five or fifty-six at the time. Her goal wasn’t for pain relief back then, just to have better mobility on the tennis courts. Pretty’s love for playing tennis has been a major social influence in her life long before the term social influencer was created.
This second knee replacement was dictated by the old devil Pain which could be quantified by levels from 1 – 10, identified by X-rays, and diagnosed with the two most feared words in any knee discussion: “bone on bone.” Pretty had to hang up her tennis racket this summer while continuing to trudge through the demands of her Antique Empire going thither and yon to pick up furniture, unload furniture, move furniture around in her booths, covering furniture in the back of her pickup truck in the rain, etc.
Since I am fourteen years older, and two knee replacements ahead of her, I have given Pretty the benefit of my good advice during the last ten days of her recovery and rehab at home – some of which has been unsolicited and would have been more helpful had I paid closer attention to the discharge details. Apparently a few changes have been made since my two bionic knees in 2019. That’s progress for you. Sometimes progress gets so far ahead of where you are that you can’t keep up with discharge details.
In spite of my counsel, Pretty has miraculously survived and in this second week moved from her walker last week to a single cane. Because of the kindness of our family and friends, we have had the most delicious home-cooked meals that put Meals on Wheels to shame. Home therapy consisted of a certified nurse for rehab three times a week and two granddaughters who’ve visited twice to check on Nana’s boo boo.
Hooray for Pretty who will have a follow-up with her surgeon next week and will hopefully be released for outpatient rehab in a facility! She is prohibited from operating a vehicle for two weeks after that, and I dread the inevitability of her resistance to authority – particularly the authority of a surgeon whose appearance reminds us more of a high school student than a medical school graduate.
As my retired military friend Bervin replied when I called him to serve as Plan B for getting Pretty to the surgery on Veterans Day, I apologized for asking him to possibly miss the Veterans Day Parade in downtown Columbia which was scheduled to start at the same time. “Ain’t no problem, Sheila. We’re all veterans of something or another.” Point taken.
In our house Pretty and I are Veterans of Bone on Bone with a quartet of bionic knees moving us along a cappella.
I'll Call It Like I See It 
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