DALLAS — What Jerry Jones and his family have conveyed in their 29 years of owning the Dallas Cowboys is their commonality with their fans. As they have enjoyed the highs and lows that have come with being caretakers of America's Team, found ways to grow the game of pro football and make it the most-watched program on television, the family has maintained their down to earth roots when it comes to Christmastime.
Christmas 2018 is not unique in that it is in the middle of the week, as that is the case most NFL seasons. However, the club is having to determine how to improve a 9-6 club that won the NFC East and capture momentum in Week 17 without compromising the health of a battered team that has clawed its way from a 3-5 midway record to one of the NFL's final 12.
Cowboys chief operating officer Stephen Jones spent Christmas Eve with his father, who is the team's owner, president, and general manager, along with the scouts and coaching staff going over the team's Week 16 win over the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, 27-20. After that, it's Christmastime.
The family will get together at owner, president, and general manager Jerry Jones' house along with matriarch, Gene, and chief brand officer, Charlotte Jones Anderson, and chief sales and marketing officer, Jerry Jones Jr., and their respective families for the next two days.
On the 26th, it's back to work and trying to find ways to help a wildcard round team go deep into the postseason.
Describing himself as a "Christmas guy," the winter holiday is Jerry's favorite out of the year. Growing up in North Little Rock, Ark., Jones and his family lived above his father's supermarket through high school, and that is where Jerry developed his love of Christmas.
"It was so festive," said Jones. "It was so wonderful as you setup the displays and all the fruit and all that kind of stuff in a supermarket atmosphere."
Even though Jerry puts up Christmas lights well before Thanksgiving and tries to leave them up until February if he can get away with it, it is going into local grocery stores that gets him into the Christmas spirit.
Said Jones: "The promotion of Christmas, the smells of Christmas, especially the produce area. You guys didn't expect this kind of detail, but I expect to really get over the hill, over the hump and know that Santa Claus is coming and get that feeling and really do it in a grocery store for me."
Jerry married Gene during his senior year at the University of Arkansas, the same year he was co-captain of the 1964 national championship team. It was also the same year Stephen was born. Charlotte came a couple years later, and Jerry Jr capped it off with his '69 arrival. How the duo would get the kids to be on Christmas Eve is by Jerry saying he may have heard Santa Claus.
"He liked to play pranks and jokes," Stephen said. "'I hear Santa Claus coming. You better get to bed.'"
When the Jones kids went to bed, Gene and Jerry would stay up most of the night assembling toys to help Santa make a great presentation under the Christmas tree.
"He'd stay up all hours of the night putting together toys," Stephen recalled. "I think some of them I found in the trash that he broke that he couldn't put together. So, he just crushed them and threw them away. He didn't even try to continue to put them together.
"But, no, we had so many great times. He loved it. We loved it. My brother and sister and I would come down. And, of course, Mother would have the camera going, and, as you said, he was sitting up there just smiling, drinking a little coffee and enjoying the moment. So, it was fun times in the Jones household."
The Jones kids loved watching the 1964 stop motion animated TV special "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer," and Stephen's favorite Christmas song is still "Jingle Bells." However, the older the Jones kids got, the more they started to doubt the existence of Santa Claus. However, Jerry put the kibosh on the disbelief in ol' Saint Nick: As soon as you stop believing in Santa, he'll stop coming.
It was fortunate for Stephen, the eldest, that he got the rest of the crew in line, because it coincided with one of the best Christmas gifts that he remembers well into 2018.
Said Stephen: "Probably the neatest thing I ever got was this — you know our family hunts — was getting a gun, shotgun for duck hunting. I'll never forget getting that. Boy, I thought that was the neatest thing I'd ever seen when I walked in and that was laid out for me to have. So, it was a wonderful gift from old Santa Claus and I still have it."
With the Jones kids older, out of the house, married, or off to college, the holidays became a time of reflection for Jerry as he tread into middle age. Prior to Christmas '88, his father-in-law, with whom he was very close and one of Jerry's biggest champions, passed away. As Jones reflected on the loss of a mentor and friend, he decided that he wanted to do more than just be the oil and gas magnate of the mid-south.
"When I lost [my father-in-law], I said, 'You know what? Boy, that's someone that's the closest to me that I've ever lost,'" Jerry said. "And I said, 'You know, this isn't a dress rehearsal. You better go for this thing.' And so he inspired me by saying, 'I'm not going to dream about it, talk about it. I'm going to go do it.' And his loss on the 28th of December really inspired me to buy the Cowboys."
Jones was vacationing in Cabo San Lucas when he read that the news that Bum Bright was putting the Cowboys up for sale. Jones went with his gut and bought the team and was a "walk-on" in pro football, as he described himself.
As soon as Jones bought the team on Feb. 25, 1989, he instantly became a lightning rod for Dallas fans and media alike. How dare he fire Tom Landry. Who's Jimmy Johnson? Why is he leading the Chicago 11 and opposing Jim Finks as NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle's successor? How stupid it is to trade Herschel Walker for veterans (ignoring the boatload of draft picks). He's ruining a once proud franchise and he's going to tear the fabric of the NFL — all the way to a 1-15 finish.
Even on the last day of the season, Dec. 24 versus the Green Bay Packers, Krampus visited Jerry for Christmas '89 rather than Kris Kringle.
"I woke up in Stephen Jones' rent house cold and early to a phone call that every commode in Texas Stadium was frozen," Jerry recalled. "Every one of them. And we were going to have about 50,000 Green Bay Packer fans. And I hung that phone up and I remember back at that Christmastime the year before and I thought, 'What the hell have I got myself into?'"
Jones had gotten himself into the NFL at the cost of $140 million. The walk-on later became an All-American owner in pro football, winning three Super Bowl championships, being inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame, and turning a franchise that was losing $100,000 a day and 12 percent owned by the FDIC into a $5 billion sports entertainment leviathan recognized across the globe.
Even though the lights are brighter and the stage bigger thanks to Jones also growing the pie of the NFL, Christmastime is still as warm and familiar as it was in the years before the Cowboys became synonymous with the Joneses.
"We all appreciate the big day," said Jerry. "Our Christmas is usually a couple days before Christmas because it usually coincides with some kind of travel meet or something with football. But it's a great Christmas. I'm fortunate it gets to involve everybody. And one of the great traditions is that all of my grandchildren spend the night one night here. And it's just people sleeping on any place they can get. And it is absolutely a fabulous night. I appreciate them because some of those have gotten on up to having a big bunk-bed party from age now to 23 to eight and it makes for quite a fun time."
Jerry is also a regifter, but not in the sense of giving gifts that had never been opened. Rather, he gives his grandsons items that he has used or worn.
Said Jerry: "I particularly like to do it in some things that are related to sports, if you will. I like to do it with my grandsons. And we can all wear the same stuff. That's really fun to do. I think they kind of like it because it's come by them through me too."
Jerry isn't staying up late Christmas Eve these days. However, Gene, "the most fabulous Santa Claus to ever ride in the sleigh," as Jerry says, is still assembling toys and presents for the sundry grandkids. In fact, being Santa's little helper may have been how Todd Williams hit the fast track to become senior director of football operations/football administration.
"He'll tell you the best way to get to the top is to put together toys for Mrs. Jones for the grandkids on Christmas Eve," Stephen laughed. "It will buy you a lot of goodwill on the way to the top."
After the Christmas Eve get-together, Stephen is especially looking forward to Christmas '18. It is the first Christmas since youngest child, John Stephen Jones, graduated and became a quarterback at the University of Arkansas. Stephen's children are spread out these days, no longer under one roof, and the holiday reunion is what he looks forward to.
"That's the biggest thing is my kids are all over the place now between college, between working in New York, one going to school in Austin and it's just having everybody under one roof," Stephen said. "So, we're going to get to spend some time here today and tomorrow and have everybody together. And that's what I look forward to the most."
Special thanks to 105.3 "The Fan" [KRLD-FM] for having the Joneses open up their hearts about Christmas since 2014.
What are your favorite Cowboys-related holiday memories? Share them with Mark on Twitter @therealmarklane.