by Hannah Bailey

Every family has a Christmas tradition, a set of procedures for their Advent season. My family tradition revolved around Black Friday and a singular piece of iron. It was a simple piece of hardware, just a singular shaft shaped to come to a blunted tip. It was black and unassuming, hiding easily wherever it was placed.

Father did the placing; it was a man-of-the-house privilege to hide the nail. My siblings and I never knew where he hid it; that wasn’t the point. The point was to sit and watch as Mom, delicately lifting it by its silk fastening, removed the nail from its holding chamber, a recycled, red Christmas card box. The point was to watch as she lifted it up for her own inspection, as if the nail had somehow been damaged in the months it spent buried in the attic. She held it up for us to see too. We made a point to closely examine it; that was expected.

She offered it to our father who took it reverently and closed his eyes to think thoughts he never shared with us. My siblings and I were situated in small clusters on the living room floor, surrounded by yellowed ornament wrappers and candy canes, listening to Caedmon’s Call drift from the kitchen. Dad’s reverence was part of the tradition.

He would always start with a rhetorical question about how much we remembered from last year. There was a reason they treated the nail so delicately when it could have decimated the decorations surrounding us if used the right way. It was not the nail they were taking care of; it was the story the nail represented.

Jesus lived in our house. He slept on the third shelf of my father’s bookcase and told us stories about God and salvation. We always made a point to listen when we heard his stories. This was one story that never changed.

Dad gestured to the barren tree behind him. Only lights glittered on its branches, no ornaments of glass or other. The nail came first, he explained for the sixth time in my life.

What is Christmas?

Christmas is Christ’s birth.

What do we celebrate at Christmas?

We celebrate Christ’s birth.

Why do we celebrate Christ’s birth?

Because he sacrificed himself so that we could be saved.

These were our Advent catechisms. We rehearsed them once a year, sometimes twice. We knew them by heart.

The nail goes on the tree first because Jesus and his sacrifice is behind everything we do at Christmas. The nail is behind all the bells and whistles of the commercialized holiday. When Christmas passes, the nail is last to come off the tree; we should leave December thinking about Jesus. Jesus is first and last, and we ought not forget that.

The speech never changed. We learned it well. But tradition is more complicated than memorized lines recited once a year. Tradition is something deeper than what people see on the surface.

Tradition became our parent’s subtle eye contact when the nail was drawn from its beat-up, Christmas card box. It was just us, my father would tell her, his lips pursed. His traditional spiel speech was absent that year. Tradition was their hug—when they put their foreheads together and prayed. Tradition was Dad’s slight grunt when he crawled under the tree to hide the nail. It was Mom helping him back up and hugging him while they looked at the tree, now properly decorated with the hidden nail.

Tradition became me standing by my small tree in my small room holding a Home Depot nail tied to a string. It became my older brother holding a traditionally designed iron nail while looking our grandmother’s tree up and down. It was my younger brother pondering life and Christmas while the neighbors put up their inflatable decorations.

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Hannah Bailey is an aspiring writer from Panama City, Florida. While she is from Panama City, she was raised all over the United States and has experienced a variety of climates and cultures. She first received her Associate of Arts degree from Gulf Coast State College before transferring to Troy University to obtain a Bachelor of Science in English. Now, she is working on completing a Master of Arts, English Creative Writing degree. In her spare time, she works at the local college as a writing tutor and teaches students how to strengthen their writing. The remaining free time between school and work Bailey spends writing, reading, and fantasizing about getting a pet hairless cat.