As the Christmas holiday approaches, I am reminded of my own childhood experiences during this time, and how I use it to craft the memories I would like my children to have.

Christmas has very little religious meaning for me now, as I know that historically Christ was not born on the 25th of December, nor did he ask his disciples to remember his birth; but rather his sacrifice. I keep Christmas now out of sentiment, and because the origins of the celebration that became Christmas resonate with me. The “Old Germans” who became my ancestors celebrated in the middle of December because it was the shortest day of the year, and marked the turning point of the season. It celebrated life during the death of winter. Being alive to celebrate anything in December was cause enough to do so. A celebration of life right in the middle of the starkness of winter is enough for me to celebrate the spirit, if not the letter of historical accuracy.

As a child, Christmas was a time of high excitement that you just could not help but observe. My family was enthusiastic with the whole process. Thanksgiving would start the season. My mother in the kitchen creating magic for the family that culminated not only in a feast for the night, but for the opening of a month long journey towards Christmas. I would sit in the den watching the Macy’s parade and although I didn’t realize the immense amount of work the meal required then, I am grateful now for the labor of love that my parents instilled into those seasons.

The decorations would slowly start to filter into the house the first week of December, right before my birthday. Decoration would build steadily to the the denouement of us bringing in the tree in the second week or so.

We would go every year into Philadelphia or New York. Philadelphia had a couple of department stores with orchestrated light shows, and the “Lit Brothers” department store had a Christmas Village of animatronic people in a Victorian setting. The pathway would lead you through a quaint little town of shopkeepers and craftsmen getting ready for Christmas in a turn of the century setting. The pathway would drop you off in an alcove where you could meet Santa Claus and then exit out to the toy department where a monorail ran around the ceiling.

Even though I don’t like cities per se, even then, they had an energy that was palpable to me even at that young age. The buildings are impossibly tall, and the smells of chestnuts roasting on the streetcorner carts were memorable. The stores were decorated, and in New York we went to Macy’s and of course FAO Schwartz. A light snow was falling and the place seemed magical to me then. We took the train which came into Penn Station and that by itself was a bit overwhelming. My brother lived in town about then, and escorted us through the subway system. Finally we ate dinner at Luchow’s German restaurant (dated back to the turn of the century, sadly gone now). It was only several hours but the imprint remains.

My parents were both children during the Great Depression. My dad was probably a bit worse off than my mom, although she didn’t have much. My grandfather was in a sanitarium because of Multiple Sclerosis and my Grandmother was working menial jobs. My dad told us many times how terrible his childhood was. One year he got a dollar bill and an orange from my grandmother, it was all she could afford. He said the both sat there and cried. He also told me about how his well to do neighbor was going out to get a Christmas tree, and my dad asked if he could get one for him as well. My dad said the guy came back with one that looked like it was an afterthought, all scraggly and sick looking. He never forgot it, and I guess he compensated for that insult the rest of his days. We would drive up to Potter County PA (about 5 hours) where my dad had a vacation house. We would buy at least 5 or six trees and cram them into our suburban and drive home, dropping them off at different families’ houses on the way home. The last tree was always the biggest and we would have to hack about a foot off the bottom to get it into our house.

My dad used to use these giant incandescent bulbs for Christmas lights. They were about the size of a night light bulb, but so hot when the burned I can’t believe in retrospect we didn’t ever lose the house. We would decorated the tree with the usual glass balls and ornaments such as our family had collected over the years. My brothers and sisters and I would fight over who got to put this one particular ornament up, a soft plastic Rudolf the Red Nosed Reindeer. Then we would layer the whole thing with tinsel. Looking back on it, it was a pretty garish sight, but then again, it was the 1970s. I am also old enough to remember when the tinsel was made of very thin strips of lead. I felt very suitably heavy in your hand when you laid it on the branches and I remember the first time the plastic tinsel came out and wondering what had happened to the old stuff. I didn’t particularly care for plastic tinsel, even though I know now why they got rid of the lead stuff.

Our house was an old Victorian, and the tree looked very proper in the bay window that faced our side yard. We would have the tree for several weeks prior to Christmas, and I was so entranced by the tree and the anticipation of presents that I would take my blanket and my favorite teddy bear and sit behind the tree and just gaze at the lights and smell the rich pine smell. I would sometimes fall asleep there. I still get flashbacks of that when I smell fresh cut pine.

My dad would play Christmas music starting the first of December. All the old standards that are now classics sung by then the big names in recording. Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Perry Como, Bing Crosby singing “White Christmas” Jim Nabors with “Go Tell it on the Mountain” and Judy Garland singing “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” . I don’t know what memories that brought him, but he told my sister it was his favorite, but that it brought some bittersweet memories for him.

The decorations in my house were always somewhat extravagant. We had German and Swiss decorations we bought on vacations, of just about every variety. We had elf dolls from Norway and carved wooden horses from Denmark. He really went overboard; but I suppose my dad was finally enjoying himself, affording things as a surgeon that he never could have imagined as an impoverished child. There were exceptions though. The stockings we hung on the mantle were cheap looking and drably colored. If you looked closely at them, you would realize they were the same elastic stockinettes that he used underneath a plaster cast for mending broken bones, but they had been dyed by hand to a pale red color. They might have seemed out of place but if you knew what they were and where they came from they became more appropriate than anything other decoration in our living room. When my dad married my mother she had 6 children already and he was an Orthopedic Resident. His monetary situation was very tight, and ever the resourceful provider, the cast clinic supplied stockings for his new family.

My father’s becoming a success was an interminable struggle and those stocking represented both the poverty he had endured as a youth and prosperity he had achieved.

He could very easily have replaced them by the time I was a child, but he liked to remember from where he came, and recognize the impermanence of wealth. Similarly, our giant Christmas tree with all its lights, decorations and tinsel was topped by a star made of cardboard and foil with a single white light in its center. He had explained to me that as a young man he was able to afford some decorations but not others, and had to make some with his own hands. He had made that star with a compass, ruler and an exacto knife. Like hand-dyed stockings of humble origins, the star had been created out of necessity and longing for what could be, and it stayed as a nostalgic memory of what was, both good and bad.

I remember a couple of times as a very young child, following my high-school aged brothers and sisters with their friends around our neighborhood. They would sing Christmas Carols and the people would stand in their doorway and give us candy canes. At the end of the night, we ended up at someone’s house where their parents made us hot cocoa. To this day, I will not drink or serve any cocoa that comes in a packet. Instant cocoa is an abomination, to my mind.

Cocoa is a beverage that should warm not only the body, but the soul. When my kids were smaller than they are now, my wife bought a package of “Swiss Miss” instant cocoa. I fired it right into the trashcan. After making her a cup, there has never been a further discussion of what it should and should not be.

Cocoa is hot milk, poured slowly into a mixture of unsweetened cocoa (I recommend Droste or Hershey’s) and sugar. Mix the two with at first a teaspoon or so of liquid so that it make a paste, and then pour a stream of hot milk, stirring all the while. Top with a couple marshmallows. There is no substitute.

We children would always visit our neighbor. He was a professor of language at a local university and he was very accommodating and kind to us children. He used to welcome us into his house where he had set up a Christmas Village in his living room out of small boxes hand painted and with cotton snow on the peaks of the houses. There was an old child’s toy in the room too. It was an old riding toy made for a child, on which I fit perfectly. It was a brown bear, standing squarely on all four legs, with wheels on each paw. It rolled nicely with a child on its back, and had a metal ring at its neck that made it growl.

I saw one of those years later in a museum, it was presumably worth a king’s ransom

His wife would bring us sugar covered doughnuts and warm cider. He had a set-type printing press in his basement, and his Christmas cards ( which I still have) were hand made pamphlets detailing in vintage typeset a short story from some far away place. They always concluded with “and now that our story is concluded, we wish you a merry Christmas”…They are gone now, but his daughter lives in his old house.

Near Christmas Eve, there would be a flurry of baking and cooking. My mom always had something coming out of the stove. We would watch “Charlie Brown Christmas” which came out when I was about two years old. My dad would make “Tom and Jerrys” which was a hot drink reminiscent of eggnog, but not so thick. Made with nutmeg and eggs, but the whites were beaten into meringue and combined with beaten egg yolks and brown sugar. Boiled milk is poured over dollops of this batter. It was apparently a very popular drink in the 1950’s, and it still is today in my house. My father invariably would have to run out to the hospital, and while he was gone Santa Claus would visit. Our door had antique sleigh bells around it, and the opening of it could be heard down the block. Santa would come in and sit us on his lap. He had a small box of chocolate santa clauses for each child. One year I noticed that Santa Clause had a wedding ring similar to my father’s but the next year it was gone. I began to wonder if the absence of my dad and the sudden appearance of Santa was more than a coincidence, but at least one year my dad was there taking pictures of Santa so who knew? My mother confided in me that one year, my dad had our neighbor stand in for the ‘real’ Santa. The kids crowded the doorway hoping to see his sleigh, but he explained he had parked it down the street. He trudged away in knee-deep snow with the eyes of all these kids on him. Unable to break character, he had to struggle past his own house and get out of eyesight. Our combined front yards were about 200 feet, and he really had to work to get home and out of his costume. My mother said he nearly had a coronary, but I think she was just exaggerating. He lived for many years after that, but used to toast us from his living room through the window. He would wave at us through the windows as we dragged our sleds across his lawn, covered in snow the same way it had been for him, those years ago. I know now why he looked so contented.


The kids would go into the living room and sit around my dad on the couch. He would read aloud from “T’was the Night Before Christmas” and after leaving a plate of cookies and a glass of milk out for Santa Claus we would go to bed.

We would not sleep well. I don’t think any of us dreamt of storied sugar plums, as I don’t think we even knew what a sugar plum was. We boys dreamed of bicycles and .22’s, slot cars and train sets. The girls dreamed of Barbie and Baby Dolls that closed their eyes when you lay them in your arms, just like real babies.

Invariably, we would get up at the crack of dawn. We were not permitted downstairs without my parents, so whichever child got up first would quietly wake the others. We would group around the staircase, eyes peering through the balustrades, trying to see under the archway to the living room where the trove of Christmas treasure lay just out of sight. After some time, we would elect one of the children to knock on my parent’s door. After some negotiations with said child, my parents would slowly rise, looking as though they themselves had not slept as well. We always assumed they were as excited at the prospect of Santa Claus’s visit as much as we were. We could never understand why they didn’t wake up as readily as we did though.


Downstairs we went, but we all had to stop at the bottom of the stairs while my dad filmed us with his “Super8” movie camera. As far as capturing the moment goes, it was color movies, but they were without sound. We would watch them months later with great expectations, but the jumpy movement and fast cutaways were more reminiscent of those old –timey movies that had fast paced piano scores set to Model A’s running across train tracks at breakneck speeds and Buster Keaton falling out of windows.

The youngest child would always open all her presents first, and that was my little sister. It was a laborious process that created mounds of wrapping paper. She would be chided by the older kids to “Hurry UP” but my parents held the reigns on us pretty well. Any day but Christmas this attempt at organization would have been met by wholesale rebellion and chaos; but I suppose we were all so used to the idea of obedience by the month long fest of currying favor with Santa Claus, that we didn’t object.

By the time my oldest brother and then my parents opened their gifts, the awesomeness of our booty was apparent. I always felt bad that my oldest brother got gifts like cologne and teenager stuff, while my siblings closer in age got model cars and board games. He didn’t seem to mind. One year, as he got ready to go to college, all those sad gifts of mature things were balanced by the sudden arrival of a small white Datsun in the driveway. It was sized perfectly for city parking around the University. All had been made whole, it seemed to me at my advanced age of 7. A car would make up for all those bottles of cologne and neckties that he had been made to suffer, instead of Teddy bears and skates.

Even at that age I could see the worth of a ‘real’ car over the kind that were committed to only driving in circles on a plastic track.

The day would conclude with each child picking out his favorite toy and making off with it. My mother would try and get us to take everything we could carry up to our rooms immediately; but generally her living room would look like an impromptu yard sale had been interrupted and the sellers had abandoned their wares were they lay.

I look back on those years now with adult eyes. I see the work and stress that it required creating those precious moments. Like a stage play which lasts but an hour, belying the days of recital, scripting, and labor requiring a team of people and hours on end.

Our Christmas’ were stage productions as well, for an audience of children from only our family. Borne of the enthusiasm of our parents; they created for us what they themselves wished for as children and did not have. It was simply an account of their greatest Christmas fantasies, brought forth from the gray of their poverty and made real where they could experience it finally and at last with their own children.


It seemed at the time that those moments lasted only for the minutes and hours as we experienced them.

But now with them still with me, I realize that the work was not just for those moments, but the images and memories that they created. The sum of those experiences has been woven into a fabric of recollection; it stretches forth now and covers my children and me. Across the breadth of time, I can feel it, sense it.

The smell of tree and of a family gathered around it. Eating, Drinking, Celebrating.

Together.

Still.

What a great tale of Christmas. Thanks for sharing it, really brings the spirit of the holiday to light. I'm going to try some of that REAL hot cocoa!

My memories of Christmas are quite similar to yours but you have such an elegant way of describing the events and I thank you for sharing.

As always, Stunning and beautiful. Rich with history and homespun charm. A delight for readers of all ages. Better then the proverbial "Fly on the wall". I felt connected to the characters.

Bill N.Y., Barthmobile.com review

Windsor Dalrymple does have a way of describing everything in such rich detail. I am surprised he doesn't write short stories or has penned a book.

Read some of his other posts. He does have a flair for the written word.

...I cannot afford my Barth.

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Well done (again)!

Great story, it brought back fond memories of Christmas and past Holiday Seasons.

Thank you for your wonderful story.

Barry

Brought back some of my past christmas's We had 11 acres of woods and pasture so we would cut a tree off of our own property. When i was 13 or 14 my dad had me go out to get a tree. No good ones to be found on our land so he sent me up the road to find one......none to be found anywhere. I came back and told him that, and he said he would show me where there were trees ........None to be found anywhere. Finally more as a joke than anything else we cut down an alder tree. Took it home and mamma was not amused. Set it up and decorated it and by the time we got thru you could not tell that it was not a fir tree unless you really looked at it and noticed that you could see the lights that were on the back side of it. Had people sitting within 5-6 ft. of it for hours before they realized something was different about that tree. Turned out to be one of the best trees we ever had!