Most of the year we’re looking to the future--planning, guessing what will happen next, preparing for damage control. But every year at Christmas we’re more likely to be looking back to a gentler past.
This month, as I have been preparing for Christmas 2021, I’ve found myself looking back a lot, reminiscing about my childhood Christmases in the late 1940s and 50s. Like everything else, the celebration has changed.
As usual, this year Oliver and I set up our Christmas tree on Thanksgiving night and started decorating because so much work is involved in the process that it seems a shame to enjoy it for only a few days. Even at that, we were behind many people who had apparently decorated for Christmas before Halloween.
That made me think of my Christmases as a young child in Columbus, Miss., when Christmas didn’t take over the whole month of December or the whole house.
About a week before Christmas my mother would hang a small wreath on the front door, and my dad would bring in a table-top Christmas tree that we decorated with a string of fat multicolored lights and a few ornaments. There was no theme to the tree and no “color palette.”
Mother made our only other decoration, an apple that she turned into a Santa with cotton for hair and a beard, a black ribbon for a belt, raisins for eyes and buttons, and four toothpicks for legs so that he could stand up. He perched on the mantel until he began to go the way of all old fruit. For years I pictured a wilting Santa walking on four legs like my German shepherd Skipper.
Back then, the season wasn’t filled with holiday events every night. I do remember being in one Nativity program at our church. All the little girls quickly applied to be angels, so I had to settle for being a shepherd with the boys, of which we had a smaller supply. It was an okay gig. All I had to do was look up at the big star and listen to the “angel voices” from the other girls who weren’t dressed up in a bathrobe with a towel over their heads, as I was.
My favorite holiday activity was a night visit to downtown Columbus, which in that city was called “Uptown,” to see the animated window displays. Cotton snow covered the display floors where trains ran in circles and little toy soldiers marched around the dolls, whose eyes opened and closed by some kind of miracle. I had never had such a doll and never expected to!
Once I was invited to dress up and ride on a float in the Columbus Christmas Parade. I was to be an Arabian dancer. I have no idea what an Arabian dancer had to do with Christmas, but it didn’t matter. Wearing a long, swishy dress with gold braid and sequins on it and waving to my many fans and admirers on the sidewalks totally beat out portraying a shepherd in a bathrobe and a towel!
Santa came on Christmas Eve, apparently while I was sleeping, though I always felt as if I never slept a wink on that night. And it was hard to sleep with all those closet doors opening and closing and the sound of footsteps back and forth.
On Christmas morning my parents and I huddled in our seldom used living room near the tree, shivering until the space heater caught up and warmed us. I reveled in what Jolly Old St. Nick had spread around the floor for me, and then we opened our presents to one another.
I don’t remember all of my gifts, of course, but some were memorable. I finally got that blond, blue-eyed doll that I had seen in the window display. She had eyes that opened and closed under frilly eyelashes. Her arms and legs moved, and you could wash and comb her shiny synthetic hair.
One year my California aunt sent me a two-storey doll house fully furnished with little beds and dressers and sofas. It had a kitchen with a stove and cabinets. The most intriguing piece was a tiny washing machine with a lid that you could raise.
One of the most amazing gifts I ever received was a Viewmaster. You stuck a disk into it that showed tiny slides of beautiful scenes like the Grand Canyon, or pictures of fairy tales like Snow White when you pointed the device toward the light. To change the scene, you pressed a lever on the side. I spend hours clicking through the disks on my Viewmaster. and dreaming about the places and people it portrayed.
Inspired by “The Night Before Christmas,” I hung a stocking one year. When I opened it looking for sugar plums, I had a shotgun shell, a box of matches and a can of sardines. My dad ate the sardines and put the other items away. He apparently never read “The Night Before Christmas.'
We didn’t have all the decorations, all the frantic events, all the Wifi-requiring gifts, all the hoop-la of today’s Christmas. But somehow, what we had was all more special and more exciting.
I miss those Christmases.
