Editorial-Opinion – December 2015

My path this December, this run-up to Christmas, tracks a path many of you have trodden, and proceeds along a path the rest of you will follow. This is my first Christmas without either of my parents. This month and Christmas Day will be bittersweet.

I don’t think there is any day of the year that is more home-centered than Christmas. For me this year, my leaders of that day, all my life, and my leader of the home will not be in the home.  The  absence of my parents leaves an unfillable void, and that is bitter. 

But there is also a sweetness.

December has always been one of my favorite months afield. For me, December is a clean month. The leaves have fallen, save some oaks and beech trees, there has been a killing frost, the air is cold, but does not bite, and dogs can run all day and stay cool with a keen nose. 

Ducks are moving in, winter doves are colored an almost blue in the cool sun, woodcocks will startle both a bird dog and a quail hunter when they come up clattering through the thick brush of a creek bottom. There are no more spider webs to deal with when you walk a log across a creek in December. 

Deer trails and rubbed trees that may have been hidden in October and November now shine in the clean woods, sharing fresh secrets from this season and holding the promise of a good deer season next year. 

December is so much a month of decoration and tradition. For instance, many families have a traditional star placed atop their Christmas tree. That star is more than a simple decoration, and more than tribute to the star that proclaimed the birth of Jesus. It is also a family reservoir, a keeper of ownership and membership and love in the family that each year, lifts it up. These traditions and objects are dear to us all. 

But like you, I have others; things that are not religious in their origins, but things that are no less a reservoir of love and remembrance and place in my family. In a small box in my chest of drawers there is a very old Case knife. The stag grip as well as the blade itself  have grown dark with age and use. The blade itself is about half of what it was new, and its use and sharpening have worn love and memory into the knife. High on a bluff overlooking the Oostanaula River in Gordon County, my grandfather used that knife to teach me how to make a whistle in the summer. But more importantly, just after Christmas the winter I turned 8, on that same bluff, he opened that knife and handed it to me saying, “You killed it, you clean it.” 

I was beaming because he was addressing my chore for the first squirrel, the first game, I had taken with my first gun, a 20-gauge single barrel shotgun. My grandfather and father coached me through cleaning that squirrel all by myself, and much attention was paid to me and my squirrel at home when it was cooked and eaten. 

I could be trusted to handle a shotgun, to aim well enough to hit a target, to be skillful enough to hunt a squirrel, to process the game taken, and to contribute to the sustenance for the family

It was a rite of passage for me. 

That knife had passed from my grandfather to my father. 

One gray December Saturday morning nearly 30 years ago just outside Culloden, my father and I were admiring his 8-point buck. When the moment came to field-dress the buck, Dad pulled that knife from is pocket and said to me, “I don’t know if Daddy Will can see us, but I want to use his knife, just in case.” 

It is this spiritual link between generations and ethics that binds us together as both family and as a larger community of sportsmen. 

Two days after Dad returned home from WWII, he bought an Ithaca Model 37 12-gauge pump. All of the bluing had disappeared by the time I came along. Its clean steel patina has remained through the years. To extend the pull, he added a recoil pad. The pad is larger than the butt of the stock, and he liked it that way. It started life with a modified choke. After so many shells, I wonder what its choke might be today. That was his quail gun, his dove gun, his squirrel and rabbit gun, and he used it to take his first two deer. 

It is December when granddaddy’s knife, dad’s pump, and my single barrel once again go afield. It is my own pilgrimage to the roots of family, the learning of responsibility and self-reliance, and the ethics of the land and of life. 

I know that each of you have your own items and traditions. I tip my hat to you and your traditions this December.