Memories are often bittersweet. We tend to focus on pleasant ones and to block out the unpleasant ones. At the same time, for folks of my age, most of the participants in the ones we remember are no longer with us. This dichotomy is certainly exaggerated when I think back to the Christmases of the past.
My earliest holiday recollections are of Christmas on Lafayette Street when my brother Joe and I were young. Fortunately for us, our parents went all out to ensure we had memorable Christmases, even during the darkest days of the War. I don’t think our father’s family emphasized Christmas as much as the Kleeses did, but he quickly adopted our mother’s enthusiasm and became a welcome partner in the celebration. It is sad that he didn’t live long enough to extend this to his grandchildren; fortunately, our mother did. It is hard for me to imagine Christmas without the two of them.
Christmas Day on Lafayette Street was a day for visiting all the neighbors, especially those with children our age, to admire their trees and inspect their gifts. I was always eager to go to Rothermunds and help Dick and Ron baptize the new board games they had received. The Jones family was another must stop — the parents spent the entire night setting up a massive electric train and village set to await the awakening of Amos and Gary on Christmas morning. Ironically, while I was home on Christmas leave from the Army in 1953, our whole neighborhood was in shock with the news that Amos had been killed in the crash of a Navy plane in Iceland. His death haunts me each Yuletide.
Christmas Eve services at Bethany Church were delightful memories, except for the year that Bob Baldwin, Leonard Styche, and I were drafted to portray the Three Wise Men. As Alma Weise played the hymn “We Three Kings of Orient Are”, we each paraded majestically down the center aisle, delivering our gifts to the Christ Child, while singing the appropriate verse. Caspar (Bob) and Balthazar (Leonard) both had strong voices and could sing in tune. Melchior, however, couldn’t carry a tune in a basket, and his rendition of “Myrrh I bring, its bitter perfume, etc.” was an embarrassment. One of our neighbors complimented me on my costume by stating “You look much better than you sound!”
Christmas 1954 was the first one I spent away from home. Somehow my two best Army friends, Sam Farha and Don Wise, and I were able to wangle three day passes for Christmas weekend at a very plush R and R (rest and recreation) hotel near Mt. Fuji. Built in 1936 in anticipation of the ill-fated 1940 Olympics in Japan, it was known as “Fuji View” in those days. It was commandeered by the Army in 1945 and became a popular resort for GIs through 1958. I do have fond memories of a delightful meal on Christmas Day there, with Tschaikovsky’s “Swan Lake” as background music.
Christmases with our children involved a reversal of roles. Now the grown-ups were up all night emulating Santa Claus. The funniest all-nighter was the one when we were assembling a cardboard playhouse for Beth at our Lindendale house. Success came after numerous attempts to follow incoherent instructions, only to realize that Aunt Gladys was trapped inside and couldn’t get out without disassembling most of it and starting over. Those years involved massive help from both grandmothers, was well as from Gladys and Aunt Betty. And then there was the year we learned at the last minute that John (five or six years old?) desperately wanted his own electric train. I spent most of the afternoon and half of Christmas Eve driving around the South Hills looking for one, finally located the last one available south of the Golden Triangle at Rogers Hardware in Lebanon Shops. It was a chintzy tin-plate Marx model, but it thrilled him nonetheless.
At some point Betty and her husband Jack (Shaffer) became convinced that raising Christmas trees was an attractive commercial venture — just plant inexpensive seedlings and five or six years later cut them down and sell them fof fifteen dollars. No mention of all the nurturing and trimming required in between. At any rate, one year when the trees were mature, we cut down eight and hauled them home. Somehow we came up with enough lights and ornaments to decorate them all. We had them in our bay windows, in each of the children’s bedrooms, and in the basement, as well as a big one in the living room. That really was overkill; we limited ourselves to one in later years.
My favorite day of the season was the day my mother would come over and help Nan make Christmas cookies. By the time I got home from work, our dining room table would be completely covered by lavishly decorated sugar cookies of all shapes — Christmas trees, wreathes, Santas, camels, bells, and stars. Fortunately, the girls have inherited Grandma’s recipe and Nan’s cookie cutters, and have perpetuated the tradition. Sara and Jim sent us a photo of their production this year, and I recognize every one. Nan loved Christmas; we miss her terribly.
Beth took me to the traditional Anglican Service of Lessons and Carols at Old Saint Luke’s Church this year; I was once again reminded of the miracle of the Christmas Story and its universal message of hope and rebirth for all of us. It behooves us to forget about all the trials and tribulations of life today and to concentrate instead on the vision of this beautiful story. Nine decades ago Joe and I were the focus of the season for our parents. We have seen this replicated twice, by the birth of our children and of our grandchildren. We pray the experience of our (future) great-grandchildren will be as memorable.