It’s always easy to wax nostalgic around this time of year, longing for Christmases past. Moving back to Kansas has jogged my memories of a country Christmas.

In our one-room country school, preparations for the school Christmas program would begin sometime in early December. This involved making decorations, learning songs and practicing the play – we generally wrote our own. I penned a few myself, mostly mushy tales of poor children who received amazing gifts from mysterious strangers.

When the big night arrived, the schoolroom would be packed with folding chairs and parents and uncles and aunts shushing each other as we lowered the lights. Our fathers had come up with a clever construction: several sturdy bookcases which when emptied of books, turned face down and moved together formed a perfect stage. The music would start, we’d roll up the canvas “curtain,” and the magic would begin.

The Christmas program would always end with the school board members coming down the aisle, handing out brown paper sacks filled with stuff, one sack for every person there. In the sack was an orange, an apple, several walnuts, peanuts and other nuts still in their shells, a red-and-white striped candy cane, some foil-wrapped Hershey’s kisses and a few hard candies wrapped in colorful paper. That was it. The same contents each year. And we looked forward to those Christmas sacks all year round.

In some other country schools we heard that one of the fathers would dress up like Santa Claus to hand out the sacks. We didn’t do that in Spring Valley. We all knew there was no such thing as Santa Claus. That was a fairy tale they tell city kids who will believe almost anything.

And then a few days later we got the same brown sack with the same exact contents at the Spring Valley Church Christmas Eve program. So we were double-blessed during the holidays. The Sunday School teachers wrote and directed the plays for the church programs. There was no room for my improvisational skills or turns of phrases. The script was drawn straight from the King James Bible and always included the same manger scene, and I always got to be an angel. The year when I turned 7, I was selected to be Mary. I was so excited. But there was a problem. “Mary” was expected to provide the baby doll for the manger, and I didn’t have a suitable doll. All I had was a homemade Raggedy Ann, but that wouldn’t do. I cried myself to sleep in my room at night. I knew times were really bad and there was no chance that my parents could get me a store-bought baby doll. I decided to wrap my Raggedy Ann in so many baby blankets that you couldn’t tell what it was.

My grandmother Elizabeth came over just before we left for church while my mother was adjusting my costume, which consisted of one of her scarves tied around my waist and another over my head fastened under my chin with a safety pin and flowing over my shoulders. “I have a present for you,” my grandmother said, handing me a shoebox tied with a red ribbon.

I figured it was new shoes. Christmas gifts – those few we got – were always practical. I set the box down.

“No, open it now,” she urged.

“It’s not Christmas until tomorrow,” I demurred.

“No, we’ll make an exception tonight.”

“No, Mamma,” my mother rebuked Grandma, “We’re late to church. We have to go. Let her open it in the morning.”

“No, now,” my grandmother said sternly.

I opened the box. Inside, nestled in white tissue paper, was the most beautiful baby doll I’d ever seen. Its face was sweet, and its head was made of soft, not hard, plastic. Its body was pillow-like stuffed muslin, but the arms and legs were soft molded plastic that looked like real pinkish-colored baby skin. I clutched it to me and said, “It’s my baby Jesus. It’s my baby Jesus.”

I was never so happy as I was that Christmas.

Once you became a teenager, all-night Christmas caroling became the major event. After the church Christmas Eve program, the monotony of which we could barely tolerate by now, we’d rush home, ditch parents and little ones, don many layers to keep warm, and reconnoiter back at the church. We’d pile into a half-dozen cars and start out about midnight going from farm to farm. At each stop, we’d position ourselves under the master bedroom window – if we could figure out where that was – and sing about five carols, ending with a rousing rendition of “Joy to the World.”

Then we’d shout “Merry Christmas” as loud as we could, hoping to be invited into the house to warm up : .and be fed. Usually we were. There would be hot chocolate with marshmallows or steaming apple cider, cookies and sometimes fresh-baked cinnamon rolls.

The church provided a few adult sponsors – fortunately, not any of our parents. The sponsors would be younger couples who could handle staying up all night and discreet enough to pretend they didn’t see some of the cuddling going on in the back seats between stops. You had to keep warm!

I remember how crisp the air would be, how bright the stars shone. How the snow would reflect the moonlight. We’d cut our headlights and run dark as we approached a farmyard. (I’m not sure why, since we were, after all, determined to wake them up with our caroling.) Having hit all the farms where we were likely to be fed, we’d finish up the night by going to town and caroling at random houses -who seldom invited us in and may have been sleeping too soundly to hear us. By now, throats were raw and our energy was slipping. Nevertheless, we never quit until dawn was streaking the sky.

Then home to bed, not caring about Christmas morning gift-opening, having to be rousted out by younger siblings and/or awakened by the noxious fumes of a roasting turkey.

I would love to be able to stay up all night for one more Christmas Eve and feel the brightest star send a spark into my soul, as it did when I was 17.

– Elizabeth Black is a writer living in Lawrence. A southwest Kansas native who attended Kansas University, she recently returned to Lawrence after living in Chicago and then on the East Coast for more than 30 years.