Texas Creek
In a small restaurant tucked along the banks of the Arkansas River in this tiny Colorado town, candy canes dangle from glittering garland stretched across a pair of old wooden doorways. The holiday candy is nothing more than sugar and corn syrup, really, a red stripe twisted around the pearl-white peppermint stick and bent into a shepherd’s crook.
But these candy canes are special. They have a story to tell. A story that wells up from the heart of a woman and brings a wave of memories that make the words catch in her throat. A story that goes to the soul of Christmas.
Each candy cane in the Barry’s Den restaurant has a little piece of paper attached. On the paper are notes. Girl 15 years old. Boy 10 years old. In a notebook behind the counter, Brandy Barry has written the details. The girl needs a winter jacket. The boy has asked for just one toy.
And as they have for the two previous winters, people who live along the river in Texas Creek and Cotapaxi and Copper Gulch and Howard and Coaldale, schoolteachers and firefighters and ranchers and plumbers, come to the restaurant.
They reach up and pluck a candy cane from the garland string.
And then they make a child’s Christmas a little better.
The process begins as summer ends and the tourists go home and autumn begins to sweep across this peaceful land. Barry and her husband, Mark, put a box on the counter. They ask their customers to drop in the names of people who need some help. This year a husband and father was forced out of work because of an injury. Up the river, a 44-year-old man died and left a wife, a young child and a small house they were building together.
The slips of paper begin to fill the box. The Barrys call the families and ask what they can do to help.
Children become candy canes.
About 85 canes went up this year. Forty of them were gone in a week or two. Some remain, but the Barrys know that soon all of them will be gone. The people who live out here, including the Barrys, who “adopt” a family or two each year, will make sure of that.
People will also stop in to donate money to buy hams and turkeys for their neighbors.
“People put in a dollar or two,” said Mark Barry, a big guy in his late 30s who spent 15 years working in law enforcement. “And the Lions Club gave us $200.”
The people on the list, many of them teenagers, make simple requests.
“One girl said she needed hair stuff,” said Brandy Barry. “Hairspray. Mousse. That’s all she asked for.”
The first two years of the Barrys’ program brought gifts, which are delivered during the week leading to Christmas by volunteer firefighters, to more than 150 people. And then the Barrys get something back.
“We had one boy last year who got a bike for Christmas,” Brandy said. “He came in and he ran to me and put his arms around me and hugged me and he whispered, ‘Thank you.”‘
“Sometimes,” Mark said, “the kids come in to say thanks but don’t know how to say it. But if you look in their eyes, you see it.”
The Barrys’ daughters – Kassy, 15, Codie, 13, Alexis, 12, and Shelby, 10 – each grab a candy or two and buy gifts with their own money, money earned from working summers and weekends at the family restaurant.
“I like being able to help,” Kassy said. “A lot of kids don’t have what they need.”
Mark sat at one of the tables near the candy canes and a Christmas tree. He listened to his daughter. He smiled. And then he spoke softly.
“It gives the right meaning to Christmas,” he said. “It warms the heart, really.”
And one heart, perhaps, more than all the others.
Brandy grew up in Grand Junction. She was the seventh of eight children raised by a single mother, Carol, a waitress who often took a second job before Christmas. The candy canes hanging in the small restaurant along the river are new. But they were really created in a small Grand Junction home some 25 years ago.
“We didn’t expect a lot because we knew better,” Brandy said. “People in the community would help us out at Christmas. Mom and I never talked about it. We knew it was just a part of life. It was just the way it was.”
And then her voice faded and she glanced out the window. A few moments passed. And her eyes filled with tears.
“Even as a kid I could see how tough Christmas was on my mom,” she said softly. “I remember years when I didn’t want Christmas to come.”
Her mother died in 2002. The candy canes and all that they mean went up a couple of years later in the little restaurant by the river.
“Many a time people helped out my mom and all of us kids when she was struggling,” Brandy said. “Without their help we’d have had nothing for Christmas. Mom would like the candy canes. She’d be real happy with this.”
Staff writer Rich Tosches writes each Wednesday and Sunday. He can be reached at rtosches@denverpost.com.
