Pioneer Woman Christmas Quotes

Go? I thought. Go where? There’s no place on earth but this smoky bar…But there was for him: he and his brother had plans to cook Christmas turkeys for some needy folks in his small town. Mmmm. He’s nice, too, I thought as a pang stabbed my insides.

Hello?” I answered the phone. “Hello…Ree?” The strong male voice on the other end said. “Hey, Walrus!” I shrieked enthusiastically. There was a long, silent pause. “Walrus?” I repeated. The deep voice began again. “You might not remember me--we met at the J-Bar last Christmas?” It was the Marlboro Man.

Mind if I ask you another question?” I said. “Go ahead,” he replied. I cleared my throat and sat up straight in my seat. “How come…how come it took you so long to call me?” I couldn’t help but grin. It was one of the most direct questions I’d ever asked him. He looked in my direction, then back toward the road. “You don’t have to tell me,” I said. And he didn’t. But I’d wondered more than a handful of times, and as long as he was coming clean about bucket seats and other important matters, I thought it would be a good time to ask him why four months had passed between the first night we’d met in the smoky bar and the night he’d finally called to invite me to dinner. I remembered being knocked over by his magnetism that night during Christmas vacation. What had he thought of me? Had he forgotten me instantly, then remembered me in a flash that April night after my brother’s wedding? Or had he intentionally waited four months to call? Was it some kind of country boy protocol I didn’t know about? I was a girl. I simply had to know.

We talked into the night, the room blurring around us as it had done at the dance in West Side Story when Tony and Maria first saw each other across a crowd of people. Tonight, tonight, it all began tonight. My friends giggled and sipped wine at the table where I’d abandoned them earlier in the night, oblivious to the fact that their redheaded amiga had just been struck by a lightning bolt. Before I could internally break into the second chorus of song, my version of Tony--this mysterious cowboy--announced abruptly that he had to go. Go? I thought. Go where? There’s no place on earth but this smoky bar…But there was for him: he and his brother had plans to cook Christmas turkeys for some needy folks in his small town. Mmmm. He’s nice, too, I thought as a pang stabbed my insides. “Bye,” he said with a gentle smile. And with that, his delicious boots walked right out of the J-Bar, his dark blue Wranglers cloaking a body that I was sure had to have been chiseled out of granite. My lungs felt tight, and I still smelled his scent through the bar smoke in the air. I didn’t even know his name. I prayed it wasn’t Billy Bob.

It’s so weird that it’s Christmas Eve,” I said, clinking my glass to his. It was the first time I’d spent the occasion apart from my parents. “I know,” he said. “I was just thinking that.” We both dug into our steaks. I wished I’d made myself two. The meat was tender and flavorful, and perfectly medium-rare. I felt like Mia Farrow in Rosemary’s Baby, when she barely seared a steak in the middle of the afternoon and devoured it like a wolf. Except I didn’t have a pixie cut. And I wasn’t harboring Satan’s spawn. “Hey,” I began, looking into his eyes. “I’m sorry I’ve been so…so pathetic since, like, the day we got married.” He smiled and took a swig of Dr Pepper. “You haven’t been pathetic,” he said. He was a terrible liar. “I haven’t?” I asked, incredulous, savoring the scrumptious red meat. “No,” he answered, taking another bite of steak and looking me squarely in the eye. “You haven’t.” I was feeling argumentative. “Have you forgotten about my inner ear disturbance, which caused me to vomit all across Australia?” He paused, then countered, “Have you forgotten about the car I rented us?” I laughed, then struck back. “Have you forgotten about the poisonous lobster I ordered us?” Then he pulled out all the stops. “Have you forgotten all the money we lost?” I refused to be thwarted. “Have you forgotten that I found out I was pregnant after we got back from our honeymoon and I called my parents to tell them and I didn’t get a chance because my mom left my dad and I went on to have a nervous breakdown and had morning sickness for six weeks and now my jeans don’t fit?” I was the clear winner here. “Have you forgotten that I got you pregnant?” he said, grinning. I smiled and took the last bite of my steak. Marlboro Man looked down at my plate. “Want some of mine?” he asked. He’d only eaten half of his. “Sure,” I said, ravenously and unabashedly sticking my fork into a big chuck of his rib eye. I was so grateful for so many things: Marlboro Man, his outward displays of love, the new life we shared together, the child growing inside my body. But at that moment, at that meal, I was so grateful to be a carnivore again.

So…,” I began. Was it just a high school thing? Or worse, I imagined, is it just that I’m not and never will be a country girl? Is it that country girls have some wild sense of abandon that I wasn’t born with? A reckless side, a fun, adventurous side that makes them worthy of riding next to boys in pickups? Am I untouchable? Am I too prim? Too proper? I’m not! I’m really not! I’m fun and adventurous. Reckless, too! I have a pair of jeans: Anne Kleins! And I want to be Middle Seat Worthy. Please, Marlboro Man…please. I’ve never wanted anything this much. “So, um…why don’t you do it anymore?” I asked. “Bucket seats,” Marlboro Man answered, his hand still resting on my leg. Made sense. I settled in and relaxed a bit. But I had another question I’d been mulling over. “Mind if I ask you another question?” I said. “Go ahead,” he replied. I cleared my throat and sat up straight in my seat. “How come…how come it took you so long to call me?” I couldn’t help but grin. It was one of the most direct questions I’d ever asked him. He looked in my direction, then back toward the road. “You don’t have to tell me,” I said. And he didn’t. But I’d wondered more than a handful of times, and as long as he was coming clean about bucket seats and other important matters, I thought it would be a good time to ask him why four months had passed between the first night we’d met in the smoky bar and the night he’d finally called to invite me to dinner. I remembered being knocked over by his magnetism that night during Christmas vacation. What had he thought of me? Had he forgotten me instantly, then remembered me in a flash that April night after my brother’s wedding? Or had he intentionally waited four months to call? Was it some kind of country boy protocol I didn’t know about? I was a girl. I simply had to know. “I was…,” he began. “Well, I was dating someone else.” I’ll kill her with my bare hands. “Oh,” I said in return. It was all I could muster. “Plus, I was running a herd of cows in Nebraska and having to drive up there every week,” he continued. “I just wasn’t here enough to break things off with her in the right way…and I didn’t want to call you and ask you out until that was all resolved.” I repeated myself. “Oh.” What was her name? She’s dead to me. “I liked you, though,” he said, flashing me a smile. “I thought about you.” I couldn’t help but smile back. “You did?” I asked quietly, still wondering what the girl’s name was. I wouldn’t rest till I knew. “I did,” he said sweetly, stroking my leg with his hand. “You were different.” I stopped short of interrogating him further, of asking him to specify what he meant by “different.” And it didn’t take much imagination to figure it out. As he drove me around his familiar homeland, it was obvious what he would have considered “different” about me. I didn’t know anything about the country.

I took a shower after dinner and changed into comfortable Christmas Eve pajamas, ready to settle in for a couple of movies on the couch. I remembered all the Christmas Eves throughout my life--the dinners and wrapping presents and midnight mass at my Episcopal church. It all seemed so very long ago. Walking into the living room, I noticed a stack of beautifully wrapped rectangular boxes next to the tiny evergreen tree, which glowed with little white lights. Boxes that hadn’t been there minutes before. “What…,” I said. We’d promised we wouldn’t get each other any gifts that year. “What?” I demanded. Marlboro Man smiled, taking pleasure in the surprise. “You’re in trouble,” I said, glaring at him as I sat down on the beige Berber carpet next to the tree. “I didn’t get you anything…you told me not to.” “I know,” he said, sitting down next to me. “But I don’t really want anything…except a backhoe.” I cracked up. I didn’t even know what a backhoe was. I ran my hand over the box on the top of the stack. It was wrapped in brown paper and twine--so unadorned, so simple, I imagined that Marlboro Man could have wrapped it himself. Untying the twine, I opened the first package. Inside was a pair of boot-cut jeans. The wide navy elastic waistband was a dead giveaway: they were made especially for pregnancy. “Oh my,” I said, removing the jeans from the box and laying them out on the floor in front of me. “I love them.” “I didn’t want you to have to rig your jeans for the next few months,” Marlboro Man said. I opened the second box, and then the third. By the seventh box, I was the proud owner of a complete maternity wardrobe, which Marlboro Man and his mother had secretly assembled together over the previous couple of weeks. There were maternity jeans and leggings, maternity T-shirts and darling jackets. Maternity pajamas. Maternity sweats. I caressed each garment, smiling as I imagined the time it must have taken for them to put the whole collection together. “Thank you…,” I began. My nose stung as tears formed in my eyes. I couldn’t imagine a more perfect gift. Marlboro Man reached for my hand and pulled me over toward him. Our arms enveloped each other as they had on his porch the first time he’d professed his love for me. In the grand scheme of things, so little time had passed since that first night under the stars. But so much had changed. My parents. My belly. My wardrobe. Nothing about my life on this Christmas Eve resembled my life on that night, when I was still blissfully unaware of the brewing thunderstorm in my childhood home and was packing for Chicago…nothing except Marlboro Man, who was the only thing, amidst all the conflict and upheaval, that made any sense to me anymore. “Are you crying?” he asked. “No,” I said, my lip quivering. “Yep, you’re crying,” he said, laughing. It was something he’d gotten used to. “I’m not crying,” I said, snorting and wiping snot from my nose. “I’m not.” We didn’t watch movies that night. Instead, he picked me up and carried me to our cozy bedroom, where my tears--a mixture of happiness, melancholy, and holiday nostalgia--would disappear completely.