When Mother Was Eleven-Foot-Four: A Christmas Memory

By Jerry Camery-Hoggatt

This beautifully written holiday memoir follows the tradition of The Christmas Box and The Best Christmas Pageant Ever. It's the story of the author's mother, whose romantic nature and love for Christmas left a lifelong impression on her son.

Mother is a tiny woman--4'11''--except when life demands that she draw herself up to her "full height" of 11'4''. Christmas is one of those times. Father is opposed to celebrating Christmas, and every year the couple fights about it. And every year Jerry and the other kids eavesdrop nervously until their mother ensures that Christmas wins out.

When things take a turn for the worst, Mother and the boys find themselves struggling with poverty and depressed circumstances. Mother tries to make the best of Christmas at first, but when she loses the holiday spirit, her young sons decide to do something about it. In their attempt, they discover the true meaning of grace.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Baker Publishing Group
• Release date: Oct 1, 2001
• ISBN: 9781441239198

Jerry Camery-Hoggatt

Jerry Camery-Hoggatt is Professor of New Testament and Narrative Theology, Vanguard University (Costa Mesa, California). He is a widely published scholar in biblical studies and a popular fiction writer.

Book preview

5

This is the story of the Christmas of 1963, which is the Christmas that I learned what it means to be a giver of gifts. But this story isn’t about me. This story’s about my mother.

My mother’s name was Josephine Mary Knowles Hoggatt, but everybody called her simply The Lady, because in our town she was a woman of stature.

My mother was eleven-foot-four.

Okay, she wasn’t eleven-foot-four all the time, just some of the time. She was eleven-foot-four when she needed to be. Most of the time she was four-foot-eleven. She was a tiny little woman—on the heaviest day of her life she weighed less than a hundred pounds—but she always said that when she was at her very best, she was eleven-foot-four.

Whenever she would say, I drew myself up to my full height, and . . . we knew we were about to hear a story of some encounter in which she had demonstrated that even a person who was tiny on the outside could be large on the inside.

You should have seen my mother when she was eleven-foot-four.

This really happened: When Mother was in her sixties she ran a home for delinquent boys—The Tujunga Ranch Home for Boys, she called it. It was my tiny white-haired mother and fourteen juvenile delinquents.

One of the boys in the Tujunga Ranch Home was a tough little guy named C.J., whose older brother was a member of the Hell’s Angels motorcycle gang. One Saturday morning my mother was awakened by the sound of banging on her front door and the revving of motorcycle engines in the driveway. When she went to the door to see who it was, there stood C.J.’s older brother, pounding on the door with the butt end of a bowie knife. To hear the boys tell the story later, C.J.’s brother was seven feet tall, tattooed everywhere, and wearing a way-too-small black T-shirt with a skull printed on the back.

He scowled at my mother. Lady, he growled. I’m giving you just ten minutes to get C.J. and all his stuff out here on the porch.

My mother looked C.J.’s brother straight in the eye and said, "Young man, I’m giving you just two minutes to get off my property." Then she drew herself up to her full height, looked down at him, and held her gaze steady.

He blinked first.

Yes, ma’am, he said. With that, he turned around, climbed back on his motorcycle, and drove away. He took his gang with him, and Mother never saw him again.

After that, she never had any trouble with her fourteen juvenile delinquents,