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‘Tis the season to be cheerful and thankful. My Grandpa Harris, my mother’s father, never got the hang of that until he had used up nearly all of his years.

He and Grandma Harris were farmers like virtually all of my relatives, save for cousin Jesse on my Daddy’s side. He made a fortune, the rumor went, building subsidized housing in little towns like ours.

My mother would pack the four of us tightly into our old truck and drive the 15 miles or so to her parents’ place at Christmas. Pretty much the whole gang would show up. Cousins galore.

Her farmhouse kitchen was bigger than her living room because that’s where the Formica-topped dining table sat. Every square inch of counter space was taken by steaming bowls and platters of food. Across the room beyond the electric cooking stove and the small wood-burning stove used as a food warmer was the “pie table,” a small homemade table capable of holding four pies.

Etched in my memory cells today, just as vivid as the smells of country cooking, was my Grandpa Harris announcing in his deep and gruff voice to the family gathered in the kitchen: “Let’s get quiet.” That meant he was about to pray, to say grace, something my grandmother was never invited to do. The woman’s place and all.

We all lined up to load our plates with chicken, dressing, dumplings, green beans, collards, sweet potatoes, casseroles, homemade dinner rolls and a dab of cranberry sauce straight out of the can.

Family members spread throughout their house, looking for a place to sit, sometimes on the floor with plates on the coffee table. Any place to begin devouring the food.

Every year while growing up, I knew one person important to us all would be missing. My Daddy.

The story whispered back then and only spoken aloud much later in my adult life was that Grandpa Harris refused to give his blessings to Daddy to marry his youngest daughter, who was 18 at the time. I, the first born, came along a year later.

I don’t remember Grandpa Harris ever smiling. Some said he came back from WWI like that. Neither of my parents ever discussed it.

Years went by. When Grandma Harris passed away, Grandpa sold the little farm he had worked with a pair of mules while she tended chickens, hogs and the milk cow. He settled alone in a small, one-bedroom house in town.

My two younger brothers visited him in that little house from time to time in his final years. They said he would occasionally smile when they told him stories of their lives, but Daddy’s name never came up.

Sometimes now and again I think about that slice of my life and wonder how he kept that bitterness inside all those years. Seems like such a waste.

Larry McDermott is a local retired farmer/journalist. Reach him at hardscrabblehollow@gmail.com