Under the Christmas Star: A Memoir of Adoption

By David G Hill

Under the Christmas Star is a memoir of the life of David Hill's family in a small Alabama town — Boaz — in the 1950s. The Christmas Star becomes a harbinger of grace that ties together the lives of his grandparents, his parents, their adopted children (he being one), and their children. David's sister Debbie came to the family at two and one-half years old already having been through the foster care system. Her addictions, and her life spiraling downward presents the memoir's central question: Is addiction inherited or acquired? The question isn't asked clinically, but in the context of the anguish of family members who feel helpless to rescue one another, although they try valiantly. Especially when Debbie's life is repeated in her daughter's life, the third adopted child.

Heartfelt, Under the Christmas Star is a well-written portrait of a family in all its flaws and heroism.

Hill avoids oversentimentality with prose that is direct, personal, and original. His journalism background shines forth. The reader gets a satisfyingly real glimpse of the atmosphere of small-town Southern life in the fifties, of college life in the seventies, and of the work world of the eighties. Hill's parents and paternal grandmother, key figures to the story, are well-drawn from Hill's viewpoint over the years. Hill also touches on his own sexuality, his experimentation, and coming out to his parents in a way that is simple, direct, and relatable.

Although Hill doesn't attempt to answer any questions surrounding adoption's nature versus nurture debate, that interesting theme helps Under the Christmas Star stand out from the sea of memoirs. Told in a sensitive and hopeful way, Hill's painterly use of detail presents a memorable portrait of one family's experience of the pain and joy of this American life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Oct 1, 2021
• ISBN: 9781098397166

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Under the Christmas Star

© 2021 David G Hill

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

Paperback ISBN: 978-1-09839-715-9

eBook ISBN: 978-1-09839-716-6

Table of Contents

The Christmas Star

Adopting Boaz

Chosen One

Smoke Gets in My Eyes and Head

Birthdays, Underwater

Halcyon Holiday

Red All Over

A Western Auto Christmas

Christmas Everlasting

Lending Voice

Sugar Doodle

We Saw Her Ship Come Sailing In

Just Act like a Family

Christmas Reboot

The Christmas Star

Crossing the Bar

My Mission

Are You Happy?

Nobody Has Christmas Like We Do

Without Dad

Christmas Apart

The Last Hill Family Christmas

Life through Picture Windows

Faith is walking to the edge of all you have and taking one more step.

Christmas afternoon, 1964, had been a stormy time with rain, high winds, and dark clouds hanging low in Boaz, Alabama. The rain let up for a little while just after dark, and we went outside to bid some guests goodbye and a safe journey home. Clouds of all sorts were scudding across the heavens, but on looking up, there was one little clear spot. And in that clear spot was the most brilliant star I have ever seen. Everyone exclaimed over the beauty of the star amid all the dark clouds.

When we went back into the house, I asked my grandson David what he thought of when he saw the star. Without hesitation, he said, The star that led the Wise Men to the place where Jesus was.

No matter how dark the clouds of worry, doubt, fear, and uncertainty, there is always a star to lead us to the place where Jesus is, if we will only look up and see it.

Me-Ma’s Methodist church in Chickamauga, Georgia, asked members to write Advent readings. She, Nora Mildred Jackson Hill, my paternal grandmother, served as church secretary. This was her offering.

I was eight years old the Christmas Me-Ma asked me about the star. That exchange sits in my memory as transparent as if a home movie documenting the day was shown every holiday. I had been my parents’ Christmas present seven years earlier, the adopted red-headed baby boy they had waited on for five years. With Dad helming the family business and Mother in charge of the family’s business, my role was to be the ideal son.

In a year, that ideal facade would begin to crumble.

When you look at my sister Debbie in the rear-view of time, her adoption—or rescue—came just before my birthday. Her inherited addiction set the family on edge. It became the backdrop of our lives: clouds of worry, doubt, fear, and uncertainty. Then, the familial plot twists no one saw coming: Debbie’s daughter Kelly, her adoption, and her adoption of her mother’s addictions. Plus, my big, not-so-secret self to figure out.

I needed a star to lead me, and I found one—atop our family’s Christmas tree.

The Christmas Star

I have always been interested in stars. I was a star on my first Christmas, as the ultimate present for adoptive parents. I was a star at three in the church’s holiday pageant. Before I was ten, I watched stars. I spent humid Southern summer nights set up on the stone patio at home, scoping out constellations, the moon, and the stars with my telescope on its tripod legs. The 1962 World Book —our set was bound in crackled white faux-leather—led me through the mysteries of the universe with its acetate pages that overlapped. You could locate a specific star and then learn its name and its place in the cosmos.

When I talked about the star that led the Wise Men to Jesus, I had no idea that stars, gazing at them and finding meaning in ink-dark skies, would become the North Star of my life. Bible study from the black leather King James Version given to me when I became a church member led me to understand the Christmas story.

So did the star that crowned our Christmas tree. It first appeared when I was five. Black-and-white photos show it then; color photos more than sixty-five years later still showcase it. The star itself is handsome, if unremarkable. Its place in the life of our family, in my life? Remarkable in every way.

The gold-colored star is unremarkable because it is plastic. It is handsome, however, in that it is a four-pointed, slender, stately star. It is not dusted with glitter. It doesn’t have lights; it doesn’t blink. Instead, it has reflected holiday seasons from the top of my family’s Christmas trees, often pointing the way.

My eyes were as big as a shining ornament, my mouth wide open in surprise and delight. I was holding up yet another of what would become a Western Auto store’s worth of gifts each Christmas morning. The spindly white pine is situated in the middle of the living room window; its branches are far apart from each other down the trunk. Icicles glisten, ornaments dangle between the sparse layers. I knew something was at hand even at age five because my eyes were looking up, to the top of the tree, to the star: the last decoration put on the tree and the first to be taken off at season’s end. That was our tradition with the tall, slender, gold-colored four-pointed star on the top of our Christmas tree.

That tradition and that star have led my life through the dark clouds of worry, doubt, fear, and uncertainty. Its annual presence is a reminder of the remarkable life I have had thanks to my red hair and my parents’ patient five-year wait.

Adopting Boaz

William (Billy) David Hill was born outside Birmingham, in Graysville—Gintown in those days. When his parents lost a service station they had run because of his father Gordon’s drinking, they bought a caf é in Chickamauga, Georgia. They moved the family, Billy and his older brother Gordon, Jr. They lived in an upstairs apartment across the downtown street. Often, Me-Ma would be called to the restaurant in the middle of the night to fill lunch pails for the textile mill shift workers.

Owning and operating such a business was work: challenging, nonstop, never-ending work. The strain wore Billy’s parents down, but they persevered. When you owned a business, you persisted because a retail store brought a steady income; it brought stability. Being a businessman also offered social respectability. Billy took all of this to heart.

What became a fifty-two-year marriage began with a blind date. On leave from his San Diego Navy port, Billy came home to visit his parents. A friend had engaged a redhead from across the Tennessee line, Norma Zell Dorsey, to accompany Billy in the friend’s car that was outfitted with a rumble seat attached to the back. They would double-date to the movies and share an ice cream cone.

On a humid Southern summer night, the air drenched with the sweet smell of magnolia, Billy rode in the back of his buddy’s car to Rossville, a Northern Chattanooga community. Norma and her older sister Fay lived with their mother, Alberta. Alberta and the girls’ father, Norman, were divorced. She had kicked him out for rabble-rousing.

Zell and her older sister Fay mostly raised themselves. Their mother worked three to four jobs as a single parent in the 1920s to make ends meet. Zell got her drive and resilience—her fight—from her mother. Reta Elverta Stewart Dorsey grew up in Tullahoma, Tennessee, and raised her daughters in the Chattanooga area. She never liked the name Elverta. So, when she was old enough, Elverta paid to have it legally changed: Alberta. No matter, she was Bert to most folks.

Alberta, Nannie to the grandkids, also made all of her daughters’ clothes. They were the best-dressed schoolgirls from an otherwise hardscrabble home. During World War II, she worked on navy ships in California and at an explosives plant in Tennessee. She went to millinery school in Chattanooga, was a master seamstress, and a quilter. She also worked as a hosiery inspector, and, at one time, on the production line of a jigsaw puzzle factory. The seconds—puzzles with pieces missing—came home to her girls. Norma learned to solve a jigsaw puzzle quickly.

Norman Francis Dorsey would visit and take his daughters Fay and Norma to buy a pair of shoes or a dress, but they spent little time with him. Never on Christmas. Mother’s childhood Christmases were spare.

The Dorsey Sisters, their family nickname—Nannie never aged (save for her snow-drift head of hair, by age thirty-five)—would cut a small pine from the nearby woods and decorate it with popped corn and berries from holly bushes. Stockings held a piece of fruit—a treat—and a few walnuts or pecans. There were no presents, but family friends shared their Christmas dinner with the sisters.

Billy’s family celebrated the season more traditionally. Me-Ma recalled it in a family letter. "Ours was a big family, eight children, and Christmas was a happy time at our house, with a tree from the woods with homemade decorations and stockings by the fireplace. The last time I hung mine (and I was too big then but still wanted to hold on to Santa), the prize gift, found right in the toe of the stocking, was a silver bracelet with a heart for a charm. What a thrill!

"And as to the Christmas cooking! What an array of pies, cakes, cookies, candy, to say nothing of the main dishes! It was something to be among the group gathered around the breakfast table on Christmas morning and hear the conversational ball tossed from one to another. And at dinner, the table fairly groaned under the turkey’s weight, dressing, ham, and all the trimmings. Those were happy and carefree days.

Then there came the first Christmas without your daddy. What a difference it made! But no matter what happens to any of us, the sun comes up as usual, and the world turns just as it has since the beginning of time, and adjustments have to be made. The thin thread of life which is left must be woven into some pattern.

Billy and Zell’s love affair contained all of the coincidence, spur-of-the-moment activity, and longevity often associated with the times, if not the star-powered movies of the 1940s.

Zell had to sit on Billy’s lap in the car’s rumble seat. She swung her sinewy legs, from playing basketball in high school, into the car and onto Billy’s lap. With a mere head shake, her Rita Hayworth-styled flame-red hair nestled on his shoulder. Her movie-star charm and electric smile behind Lucille Ball lips were magnetic. Billy was more the strong, silent type; think Gary Cooper.

Norma thought Billy was handsome and quiet. Her sister Fay never pried because she knew two things: Norma would get the man she wanted (having co-opted a few whom Fay favored), and she would tell the story of the date in detail. Billy was a little more smitten. When his friend dropped him off at Hill’s Cafe, Billy went in to find his parents, who were busy preparing lunch pails for the first shift workers. When Me-Ma quietly but directly inquired how the date had gone, Billy blushed. I met the girl I’ll marry. She’s as pretty as a piece of lemon icebox pie.

Dad made permanent what he thought of his girlfriend when he returned to active duty as Ship-Fitter, first class. On a stopover in San Francisco, he and some of his fellow shipmen wandered along Market Street and into Frisco Bob’s, World’s Fastest Tattoo Artist. Dad had his love of the flashy, starry-eyed redhead with the great gams, forever his pretty as a piece of lemon icebox pie, inked on each of his bulging biceps: Norma. Zell. Frisco Bob might have been the fastest tattoo artist, but he was hardly artistic; Mother’s names ended up scrawled on Billy Hill’s arms.

Bill and Zell’s courtship was correspondence. Billy, when I took the clerk position at the phone company, they asked which name to use. I told them, ‘Zell.’ Zell was new; Norma wanted new. They met twice more before their wedding in Rossville, June 18, 1945. Billy proposed on their second live date. The bride was attired in a powder-blue suit with white accessories and a white orchid corsage, reported the Walker County (Tennessee) Messenger.

From his California naval post, letters home were signed, Your son, Billy. When he and Mother married, he became Bill. "Did you notice the date at the top right-hand corner? June 18, 1945. Two months ago, today. Ain’t that sumpin! he wrote to his parents. I have the sweetest gal in the world, and I want to spend my whole life with her. All in all, I think only one man got a wife as sweet as mine—that lucky man is Pop!" Bill was discharged from service and came home for good that November.

Bill and Zell wanted a new life together, a stable one. Bill wanted to provide a firm financial base through Western Auto. Zell wanted what her star-struck eyes saw on television and read in ladies’ magazines: domestic perfection. The world had turned in Bill and Zell’s favor. Christmases would be glittery greeting card images bearing heartfelt sentiments.

As kids, Mother told her older sister, Fay, that she wanted six children. Dad had mumps in his early teens. Adoption became their only way to have Kodak Instamatic photographs of children hanging Christmas stockings on the fireplace or unwrapping presents from Santa under a star-topped tree—even if any individual bulb’s starry light was rewired, repaired, or replaced over time.