Pheasant Valley Saints

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Christmas Was Going to Suck
(Some thoughts from December 2014)

Christmas was going to suck.

There was no doubt about that.  Christmas, 1979 was going to be the worst of my young life.

I was a young missionary serving in Seoul, South Korea during a very cold winter.  I was away from my family.  I was struggling to learn the language.  My companion hated my guts.  (OK, maybe hated is too strong a word—let’s just say he despised me.)  Most of the time, he barely spoke to me.  The other pair of missionaries in the apartment didn’t care for me much either.  They barely gave me the time of day.

And did I mention that it was bitter cold?  As was typical in those days in Korea, most houses were “heated” (and I use that term very loosely) by pipes under the floor.  Every six hours, we had to add a circular charcoal brick—called a yon-tahn—to a small stove outside.  The stove was built into the foundation of the house.  Hot air from the stove would move through pipes under the floor and out a chimney.  (Yes, carbon-monoxide poisoning was a real danger.)  The floor itself had hot-spots, but the air in the apartment was frigid.  I had to sit on a hot-spot with an electric blanket wrapped around me during my morning scripture and language study.

Each morning at 5 AM, one of the four of us would arise early—we took turns, you see—to go outside and change the yon-tahn.  (If you let the yon-tahn stove go out, it was a bear to restart.) Then the unlucky elder would come inside and put a very large kettle on the stove to boil.  Then the missionary would go into the bathroom and break the ice in the bathtub, exposing the icy water beneath.

At 5:30, the other three missionaries would arise, and the four of us would begin our day.  And we began our day by bathing.  (Communal bathing was the necessity.)  This involved scooping frigid water from the tub using small, square plastic bowls, adding some boiling water from the kettle, and scrubbing down and rinsing off as fast as possible in the cold air of the bathroom.  Steam would condense on the ceiling in thousands of frigid drops, poised to fall on us at any moment.  One particular missionary—we’ll call him Elder P—always managed to finish washing first.  He would run out the bathroom door, slamming it behind himself.  This would cause ice-cold droplets to fall from the ceiling onto our bare skin, eliciting cackles of impish laughter from Elder P and howls of protest from the rest of us.

Then after shivering under our blankets for a couple hours as we studied and prayed, we would venture out into the coldest winter I had ever known.  The wind howled like a Korean banshee possessing the breath of a Norse frost giant.  My coat, scarf, and hat were never thick enough to keep it out.  My feet were never warm, and my legs felt like frozen tree trunks.  Only my hands managed to stay relatively warm in a pair of gloves my parents had given me.

I was lonely, and I was miserable.  I felt like I didn’t have a friend in the hemisphere.

And I was dreading Christmas.

And to top it all off, I hadn’t received a letter from home or my fiancé for a couple of weeks.  And we wouldn’t be going to the mission headquarters to get our mail before Christmas.

Christmas wasn’t a particularly big deal in Korea, at least at the time.  It was just another workday, even for most Christians.  The “night butterflies” (a.k.a. prostitutes) in the marketplace would dress in their finest and offer free service to ministers—including us.  (We refused, of course, but for the most part, the other ministers did not.)  The Koreans didn’t even have their own version of a Christmas greeting.  They had “Meh-ri Kuh-ri-suh-mah-suh,” and hardly anybody knew what that meant anyway.  The ward did have a Christmas social—I got to put on the Santa Haraboji (“Grandfather Santa”) suit for the party and give away some candy, and that was fun, of course—but there wasn’t much else.

In our missionary apartment, the plan for Christmas was to cook a turkey (which we got to watch being slaughtered in the marketplace, right next to the row of night butterfly booths), make some lumpy mashed potatoes, and have some bread with black market butter (a real indulgence).  I was going to attempt to make some gravy from the turkey drippings, using rice flour (not one of my better ideas).

One morning, as I was shivering under my electric blanket, feeling very sorry for myself, I prayed for some comfort, for some vestige of Christmas in that cold and lonely place.  And as I was praying, I remembered a story my mother and father had put in a small, homemade Christmas book several years earlier.  The story told of General William Booth, founder of the Salvation Army.  In 1910, he wanted to send a Christmas telegram to his troops.  The cost was prohibitive and the funds were sacred, so General Booth tried to come up with a message that could be expressed in as few words as possible.  He was inspired with the perfect message for Christmas.  It was one word: Others.

I realized at that moment that if I wanted to invoke the true Christmas spirit, I needed to stop feeling sorry for myself and focus on others, specifically my companion (who despised me) and the other two missionaries (who were indifferent at best toward me).  Over the two days leading up to Christmas, I surreptitiously purchased small gifts and other surprises for my fellow missionaries.  I didn’t sneak out or do anything against the rules; I simply took advantage of the fact that my companion did his best to ignore me.  Every time we were in a shop in the marketplace, I purchased my Christmas goodies whenever my companion turned his back.  His antipathy became my blessing.

I was actually having fun!

On Christmas Eve, I lay on my futon (a foam pad on the floor) under my electric blanket and pretended to sleep.  When my companion began to snore, I snuck out of my bed and turned off his alarm clock.  (It was his turn to get up early and change the yon-tahn, boil the water, and break the ice in the bathtub.)  Then I crept quietly into the central room.

I set up a paper Christmas tree I had found in the marketplace.  It was no more than a foot high.  I cut out a few paper ornaments and hung them on the tree.  I put a small paper star on the top.  Then I placed the tiny, precious gifts I’d purchased under the tree.  They were wrapped in stationary, using glue instead of tape (which I hadn’t been able to find on my sneaky shopping forays).  Each was labeled, “To Elder _______, from Santa.”

I snuck back into bed, covering my head and placing my own alarm clock under my pillow.  I was so excited that I thought I might never get to sleep.

When the alarm went off at 4:45 AM, I quickly silenced it.  Then I laid still waiting to see if my companion would keep on snoring.

He was silent.  I was undone!

Then he snorted and commenced sawing logs again like Paul Bunyan.

I waited a few moments longer to be sure he was safely asleep, then I snuck out of bed.  From my suitcase, I dug out a paper-wrapped bundle of smoked pork and a bag of eggs I had smuggled from the marketplace inside my briefcase.  I went outside and changed the yon-tahn in the charcoal stove, then came back inside, set the kettle on, and broke the ice in the bathtub.

I cut the pork into strips and fried them.  (This was as close as I could come to bacon.)  I scrambled and fried the eggs.  Then I covered the pans and set the table for breakfast.   I turned on my cassette tape player.  Bing Crosby sang “God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen”.

Then I snuck back into bed and pretended to go to back to sleep.

I soon heard the stirrings of the other elders, including my companion.  I continued to feign sleep.

At 5:45, my companion nudged me with his foot.  “Get up, Elder.  You overslept.”

I yawned and stretched and did my best to act as if I’d slumbered through the night.  “It’s Christmas,” I said in my best whine.  “Do we have to get up early on Christmas?”

My companion shook his head in disgust.  He opened his mouth to say something, possibly unpleasant, when he suddenly froze, his eyes wide in panic.  “Crud!  I didn’t change the yon-tahn!”  He went racing outside in his pajamas, stopping only to slip his feet into his shoes.

I smiled as I heard him clamber down the stairs.

A few minutes later, when I shambled out into the central room, wrapped up in my blanket, I glanced at my tiny paper Christmas tree.  I noticed that, rather than three small gifts, there were four.  The fourth item was unwrapped, but under it was a small strip of paper that said, “To Elder Belt.”  It was a small statue of a pair of owls.  I recognized it as having once belonged to Elder P.

Breakfast was cheery and fun.  (It sure beat rice pancakes, I can tell you!)  Bathing?  Well, Elder P still beat us out the door, and the rest of us still got drenched with an icy rain, but we all managed to laugh about it.  We cooked our turkey and ate the lumpy mashed potatoes with the pathetic rice-flour gravy, ate our bread with real butter, and we all stuffed ourselves and “made merry.”  We told stories and played a few games.  We read the Christmas story from the scriptures.  And we prayed together.  It was the first time the four of us had ever prayed together.

And I made three friends that day.

And you know what else?  Christmas didn’t suck at all.