On Christmas Eve this year my family gathered at the West Columbia home of my sister (pictured above with me and Santa Claus in the early 1960s) and her family. "A great time was had by all," as the saying goes. We enjoyed a delicious meal, watched the SMU Mustangs kick ass in their college football bowl game on TV, and handed out presents. Then, with everyone in sort of a semicircle seated around the living room, we took turns talking about our most memorable Christmases. When it came to me I chose to bypass what I consider my most memorable Christmas because of its sad nature, and instead told of what I will refer to as "my best Christmas." Back in the days when mini-bikes were the craze and many of my friends and classmates at West Columbia Intermediate School had them, I asked my mother and father if I could have a mini-bike (a much smaller version of a motorcycle powered by an engine about the size of a lawnmower's engine) for Christmas. I screwed the story up when I was telling it at Kelli's house Christmas Eve. I said that when I was working at my parents' feed store in mid-December of the year I had requested the mini-bike, I wandered over to the locked up building next door to the feed store and peered through the glass in the door and just happened to see my mini-bike and my little sister's 10-speed bicycle that my mom and dad had hidden in the building that they used to store hay and other feed store related items. Kelli corrected me and said that it was she who discovered the Christmas gifts that were supposed to be from Santa Claus. After she said this Christmas Eve that she was snooping around and found our Santa presents, I now remember that she is correct. Kelli told me what she had found and later I went and looked for myself. So now, in my early fifties (I prefer to say that I'm in my late forties . . . late, late forties . . . in fact I am now forty-twelve), I get a lot of my old memories confused. My YOUNGER sister (who actually is in her late forties) will soon be finding herself having to correct stories told by both me and our (much) older brother. Alzheimer's runs in the family so we are all prone to be candidates for the memory-stealing disease. So, Reader's Digest version, that was my most memorable Christmas that I talked about Christmas Eve. But in actuality, there is one Christmas of my life that by far is much more memorable than any others. During most of my young life, my mother's mother and brother and sister would all congregate at our house in West Columbia on Christmas Eve to eat a wonderful meal prepared by my mother, and then sit around the Christmas tree and open our presents. So many very wonderful memories swirl in my mind about Christmases past. I have so many to think about when it comes to my own current family, my wife of 29 years and our sons, both our biological children and those we have taken in over the years and treated as our own kids. But sad to say, Christmas has never meant the same to me as it did when my grandmother, Clara Pauline Giesler, was a big part of my earlier Christmas memories. The tradition was for Grandma and Uncle (my mother's brother Howard Giesler) and Aunt Yvonne Broadway and her sons to leave their East Columbia home in the late afternoon on Christmas Eve and join my family for food and presents and the best part of that holiday recipe: family togetherness. So my grandmother's last Christmas was what sticks in my mind as my most memorable Christmas. Grandma, who we all called Dee-Dee when we were young kids but switched to calling simply "Grandma" when we got older because that is what all of the Broadway boys (our first cousins) called her, had enjoyed a routine Christmas Eve at my parents' house when our first born son Brian was still a baby. Peggy and Brian and I lived across the yard from my parents at the time in what had been the home of my dad's mother and father before both of those grandparents passed away. The following day my immediate family was eating our Christmas Day meal at my mom and dad's house in West Columbia when my mother took what I have to rank among the five most memorable phone calls I have ever been a part of. My Aunt Yvonne told my mother (her sister) that their mother had just died at her East Columbia home, where my Aunt Yvonne and Uncle Howard also lived. "Oh, Yvonne, you don't mean it!" my mother shrieked into the receiver. So, of course, everyone in the house stopped what they were doing and stared at my mother. As tears began to stream down Mama's cheeks, we all knew within seconds that whatever the news was, it wasn't good. So we all got in our cars and rushed to East Columbia on Christmas Day of 1983 where we walked into my grandmother's house to take in the surreal scene of everyone crying and shaking their heads in disbelief at what had just transpired. James "Scooter" Phillips, a friend and classmate of my brother Cody's, was a sheriff's deputy who had been celebrating Christmas at his mother's house just down the street from my grandmother's home. I had called the police department from my parents' house and requested an ambulance be sent to East Columbia to try to revive my grandmother. Scooter heard the call for the EMT's on his sheriff's deparment radio and rushed down the street to start CPR attempts on Grandma. My brother Cody and I were driving into East Columbia and noticed the ambulance at the wrong house, so we rode over and directed the EMT's to the correct house. But it was too late to do anything for my grandmother. The EMT's took over for the sheriff's deputy but quickly realized that Clara Pauline Giesler's life had come to an end. My grandmother would have celebrated her 83rd birthday the following month. At my grandmother's funeral, held at the historic Presbyterian church in East Columbia a couple days after Christmas, the preacher commented on how her death on Christmas Day had significant meaning because Grandma loved the Christmas holidays so very much. The story of her death, as it was told to me by those who witnessed it, was that Grandma was preparing Christmas dinner for her family. My own immediate family usually shared the noon meal with the rest of my mother's family in East Columbia on Christmas Day, with them joining us for the Christmas Eve meal. But this particular year my mother cooked for her children and grandchildren (she only had Dustin, Brian and Hayley at the time) instead of going to East Columbia. I was told that my grandmother had a turkey in the oven and other things cooking on the stove when she sat down in her rocking chair and simply slumped over . . . lifeless. My uncle ran to her and eventually picked his mothe up and placed her on a bed at the front of the house. The EMT's said she was probably dead before CPR attempts were even initiated, so it is my impression that her heart just gave out on her. Stress had to have contributed greatly to her demise as well. Her oldest daughter Yvonne was in advanced stages of breast cancer at the time, and we had buried one of her grandsons (Danny Louis Broadway) when he died at the age of 26 not too many years before Grandma passed away. My Aunt Yvonne would not survive her cancer ordeal much longer, so it is with some sense of relief that Dee-Dee did not have to live through the death of her daughter. I witnessed first hand how distraught my grandmother was over the death of her young grandson. And, although I wept like a baby when I lost my grandmother when I was in my twenties, it would have been extremely difficult to have to watch her deal with the passing of my Aunt Yvonne. Grandma's passing on Christmas Day of 1983 was, for all the wrong reasons, the most memorable Christmas of my life. But, like with the story I told this Christmas Eve at my sister's house, there are so many varied happy memories (many which feature my grandmother who died on Christmas Day) that I will treasure forever involving the Christmas holidays and the many family members and friends I love so dearly. I have included with this blog entry a number of photos from Christmases past that I hope each of you enjoys looking at. I have many more but I am limited to how many I can include with this blog entry, so if you got left out this year then check out my blog next Christmas. Hopefully the Christmas photos I took of you will appear then.
Opening presents on Christmas Eve and rushing out into the living room Christmas morning to see what goodies Santa Claus had brought with him down the chimney was always the very best part of Christmas for me. And the joy was practically the same when, like in the photos above, I was the little boy receiving Santa's gifts, or as the photo below displays, I portrayed the Santa role and put the big smiles on my own little boys' faces come Christmas morning. Above you see how elated a three-year-old Tracy Gupton was when I climbed atop my first tricycle and fired my brand new outer space laser pistol at my mom the photographer on Christmas morning, 1960, and strummed my new guitar with my big brother Cody the following Christmas morning. OK, the Everly Brothers we weren't, but didn't Cody and I look great in our fancy pajamas in 1961. My boys Bret, left, and Brian posed on Christmas morning for my camera when we lived on Reverend Swinney Street in West Columbia (check out Bret's Bart Simpson pajamas). That was the only house we lived in that actually had a fireplace (pictured in the background). But whether we had one or not, Santa always seemed to find his way into the living room to leave gifts for me and my brother and sister when we were kids, and then likewise when Cody, Kelly and I all had kids of our own.
The Christmas holidays always offered such wonderful photo opportunities. I took the photo above on Christmas Eve of 1989, my wife Peggy posing with "her babies," our youngest sons Bret and Blake; while the photo below is of my father, Rex Gupton, posing on either Christmas Eve or Christmas Day with our children, his grandsons, from left: Brian, Blake and Bret Gupton.
My mother, Verna Gupton, who was taken from us by pancreatic cancer in 1996, was the personification of Christmas to me. She and her mother, Pauline Giesler, went out of their way each and every December to make Christmas so very, very special to all of their kids and grandkids. Pictured above is my mother Verna cuttin' up for the camera, as she was always prone to do, using the new lamp she had gotten for Christmas as a prop to get a laugh. The photo above that was taken in January or February of 1958 when it snowed in Southeast Texas. That is me being held by my grandmother, Pauline Giesler (who my siblings and I referred to as Dee-Dee when we were kids), in front of the large two-story house my family called home when we lived in Markham, Texas, during the earliest years of my life.
A gallery of Santa Claus photographs from the past is presented above. Posing with ol' Saint Nick are, from top to bottom: my baby boy Blake sitting on Santa's lap in 1992, my middle son Bret with Santa, Blake with Santa from another year, my sister's son Dustin Mosteit when he was a little boy (Dustin is approaching 30 now), and Barry Gibb of The Bee Gees with Santa Claus. No, wait a minute, it's an impostor! Hey, I know that guy. Although he sadly looks nothing like he did back in the 1980s, when this photo was taken, that good lookin' hunk was me . . . many, many moons ago! I sure wish I had that hair back!
Christmas has a way of making me really miss those beloved family members who are no longer around to celebrate the holidays with us. Parents and grandparents were the biggest part of my earliest Christmas memories, as well as my siblings Cody and Kelly. So now I find myself thinking of them so often during this period of the year between Thanksgiving and New Year's. Our sons--Brian, Bret and Blake--are pictured above on Christmas Eve of 1991 with my wife Peggy and her parents, Omer and Dorothy Hall. This is one of my favorite pictures of my in-laws. In the photo above that my only surviving uncle, my mother's younger brother Howard Giesler, is shown opening his presents on Christmas Eve many years ago at my parents' house.
My nephew Rex Layne Gupton, rapidly approaching his 21st birthday (he was born on Super Bowl Sunday), is the star of the above photos which were taken by me on Christmas Eve of 1989 when "Montana" Rex was a baby, and on Christmas Eve of 1991 when Rex posed with his mom and dad, Andrea and Cody Gupton. My mother Verna dubbed her "Super Bowl" grandson "Montana" because Joe Montana led the San Francisco 49ers to victory the day Rex Layne was born. I guess if the Cincinnati Bengals had won that day, my nephew would still be called "Boomer" instead of "Montana." Cody must have really liked that shirt because he appears to be wearing it in both photos, taken a couple years apart. But that's nothing, a few years ago we were looking at old family photos and I came across a picture of me holding my youngest son Blake when he was a baby. I was wearing the same shirt the day we were looking at those old photos that I had on in the picture I posed for with Blake when he was a baby. Hey, the Gupton brothers get their money's worth out of our clothes!
In the photo above my little family gathered in the living room of my brother-in-law and sister-in-law, Ronnie and Marilyn Hall, in Pasadena, Texas, for a Christmas photo. My wife, Ronnie's baby sister Peggy, and I are shown with our boys, Brian, Bret and Blake.
When the "I Do's" were exchanged at the November 14th wedding of my adopted son, Kirk Gupton, and his new bride, the former Tanya Spears, Peggy and I went from having zero grandsons to abruptly finding ourselves the new grandparents of four darling little boys. Pictured below with Santa Claus in a photo taken during the 2008 Christmas season are my grandsons, from left, Koby Richardson, DeMarcus Randall, Trey Spears and Koy Richardson. In the photo above are Kirk and Tanya and their kids in a photo I took at our house in 2008 on Christmas day.
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