Roxanne Henke

It wasn’t my husband’s nor my idea to spend Christmas in the Bahamas last year, but the kids somehow talked us into it.

“Mom. Dad. We need to make memories while you’re still healthy.” It wasn’t as if we were gasping for our next breaths.

“If we’re going to travel anyway, we might as well be somewhere warm.” They had a point. Our little North Dakota town is difficult to get to when winter weather results in chaos trying to juggle flights and drives. One year, my daughter had to change her return flight three times.

We caved. The Bahamas it would be.

I know it’s a bit early to write about Christmas, but please bear with me. We had an unusual Christmas last year. With a birthday four days after Christmas, I get used to mixing things up, and sometimes the whole story can get a bit long. This birthday happened to be a “big” one. Number 70. In my world, “happy birthday” and “merry Christmas” go hand-in-hand. So, I’m going to do my Christmas column a bit backward this year.

Next month, I’ll write more about our very different Christmas.

This seems to be a year filled with “big numbers.” My husband and I celebrated our 50th wedding anniversary. I turned 70 at the end of 2023. And Al Gustin is celebrating his 50th year of writing his column for North Dakota Living.

At a wedding years ago, the DJ said, “All married couples, get on the dance floor.” I dragged my husband away from a conversation, and we were soon swaying at the edge of the crowd. Then the DJ said, “If you’ve been married longer than five years, keep dancing. Everyone else, sit down.” Then it was 10, 15, 20 and 25 years. At this point, my husband and I were grumbling under our breath. Neither of us likes having much attention, but we could see what was happening and we figured we would be close to the last ones standing.

Fifty years is a long time to be married, yet I remember the second night of our honeymoon as if it was yesterday. We made it to Denver, Colo., and found a Best Western motel, which was splurging considering neither one of us had a job.
We decided to go to a movie, and I used a payphone in the lobby to call my mom and let her know where we were. She was upset with me, because my uncle, who hadn’t been invited to the wedding, was upset with her. I fought tears until we got back to the motel. There, I threw myself onto the bed and started sobbing.

I still remember the first time I saw him. I was sitting cross-legged on the stage of the old Bison fieldhouse at North Dakota State University. The physical education instructor was telling us there had been 10 marriages over the years from the ballroom dancing class we were about to start. I looked over my shoulder and there he stood, late to class and very cute.

During the weeks leading up to Christmas when I was a kid, my sisters and I would stand on our fireplace hearth and, with Mom’s prompting, practice our lines for the church’s Christmas Eve program. I don’t ever remember having much of a part, but I was still filled with worry about forgetting the few words I had to say.

My mom, an excellent seamstress, always sewed new, red dresses for my sisters and me. We slipped them on, put our black patent-leather shoes over our white lace-trimmed anklets, then we would stand on our fireplace hearth and pose for photos.

If you are a Facebook or Instagram user, something will pop into your feed from a perfect stranger every now and then. Who knows how it got there. Maybe it’s a friend of a friend of a third cousin once removed.

That happened to me a few months ago. I saw a post from someone, and I had no clue who he was. The guy wrote about a short conversation he had (with a perfect stranger) while waiting in line. He went on to say how nice it was to interact with this random person, and he urged his friends to be brave and strike up conversations with people they don’t know.

The conversation went something like this:

Mom (my daughter, Rachael): “Axel, you need to put your iPad away and come eat.”

Axel (age 9): “But, I’m not done with my game.”

Mom: “Five more minutes.” Five minutes later: “Axel, time to eat.”

Axel: “But, my game isn’t over!”

Read those above four lines three more times. Finally, I chimed in, “What does it take for your game to be over?”

Axel (staring at and clicking on the screen): “It doesn’t get over.”

Me: “What? It never ends?”

What do pie crust and golf have in common? Let me tell you two stories.

Let’s start with golf. The physical education department in my little school didn’t have much of a budget. When it came to golf, we were told to grab a club and swing. I’m left-handed, but I was forced to learn right-handed, if you could call it “learning.”