Didn't realize I'd been sidetracked for a week again, but it's Christmas Eve, time for memories, with nostalgia running down my back like a skunk's white streak. Because it's the night our family opened gifts, it's the night toward which my whole childhood year tilted, even more important than my birthday, the seasonal magic making me manically giddy. Also because Mom and Gramma made it so. To get in the mood, here's a miniature "Christmas Kitchen" from an exhibition at Durham Western Heritage Museum, though it's a far more modern kitchen than Mom's, or Gramma's cramped little space with a single-file aisle between her big cast-iron range and the sink and work table. But it's cheery, even with the computer, and I liked it, even though I have to apologize for photographing it, not realizing until I left, that area, with three other exhibitions, was off limits to cameras.
Contrary to the consumerism crush today from Halloween on, most of our Christmas activity was restricted largely to December. We didn't have to explain to children what Santa was doing trick-or-treating. Catalog orders were done earlier, probably in November, though Thanksgiving retained its own identity without holly and mistletoe on the turkey, fruitcake in the stuffing. Much of our shopping was done with Montgomery Wards or Sears, Roebuck, making trips to the post office exciting, even more exciting when Mom would look at the package and take it into their bedroom, shutting the door, before opening it. (I was always a good little boy, forbidden to snoop, but accidental glimpses, such as when we were shopping in Norfolk or, rarely, Sioux City were smug secrets.) I bought the figures in Hested's dime store for the nativity scene I made that always sat on the piano on such a shopping excursion to Norfolk, and I remember the Montgomery Wards store promotional "Rudoph the Red-Nosed Reindeer comic book."
Another warm memory of those dark ages of the 1940s and 1950s was the music, really when most of the favorite Christmas songs were composed and popularized by the likes of Bing Crosby, with "White Christmas" in 1942, "I'll Be Home for Christmas" in 1943 (I have Gram's original sheet music for both), Perry Como, Nat "King" Cole, Elvis Presley, and, of all singers, Gene Autry, who wrote and performed "Here Comes Santa Claus (Right Down Santa Claus Lane)" in 1947, sang popular versions of "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" in 1949 and ""Frosty the Snowman" in 1950. Mel Torme's "The Christmas Song (Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire)," sung by many, dates from 1944. "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas" was first sung by Judy Garland in a 1944 movie, Meet Me in St. Louis, as "Silver Bells" was first sung by Bob Hope in a 1950 movie, The Lemon Drop Kid. "Let It Snow x 3" is 1945, "It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas" is 1951. Among Perry Como's Christmas hits were "(There's No Place Like) Home for the Holidays" in 1954, "The Little Drummer Boy" in 1958. Oddly enough, three evergreens were from the Thirties: "Carol of the Bells" adapted from a Ukranian carol in 1936; "Winter Wonderland" and "Santa Claus Is Coming to Town" dating from 1934. I also have Gram's tattered original sheet music for the last-named, which she banged out on the upright piano during our singing spells. I guess I emphasize the music because the season was then, as now, filled with music in those radio days. We even sang the first verse of "Adeste Fidelis" in Latin sometimes at church, and carols were just as popular as the secular songs.
Merely two or three weeks before Christmas, the trees would come in to our local groceries. I would watch them unloaded from the refrigerated trucks. We generally bought ours at Freddie's, though Bloomfield had a larger choice when his were not so good. Artificial trees were ugly then, often truly artificial, white fakery or metallic stylized silver, besides which who would have wanted a substitute for all that wonderful scent wafting through the house? I could hardly wait, but, once I had coaxed Dad into buying one by making a nuisance of myself, I had to wait, antsy, while he put it in a bucket of water in the basement overnight "to let its limbs come down." I was in charge of that aromatic totem, seeing that it was watered regularly, helping Mom decorate it, inventorying the presents, falling asleep under it with my dog every night, staring up at the colored lights, listening to the radio programs. Besides the seasonal musical programs, the regular comedy shows such as Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy, George Burns and Gracie Allen, Fibber McGee and Molly, and Jack Benny all did Christmas specials. Lux Radio Theater actually broadcast Miracle on 34th Street in 1947 and had first broadcast It's a Wonderful Life in March of that year. (The larger towns around us all had movie theaters and had regular holiday fare, too, so I saw lots of the originals, including all the ones mentioned in this entry.) Lionel Barrymore was Scrooge in The Christmas Carol on the radio. (I was Scrooge in our junior high version when I was in the seventh grade, undoubtedly channeling his grumpiness, the first of my usual character roles through junior college days.)
This is the largest Christmas tree in town, with huge ornaments to match the tree size, also at the Art Deco Durham Western Heritage Museum, which we all know is the old Union Pacific Train Depot in a new life. Obviously, such a giant dwarfs anything from my childhood, though I threw a fit if ours didn't touch the living room ceiling, at least with the little angel topper on. (My apartment complex allows no live trees by city fire regulation.) The church had a tall, live tree and often garlands. Our trees then were balsam fir. Gram and Grampa sometimes had a store tree, sometimes a scragglier, scratchy [eastern red] cedar cut in the pasture, especially Up West north of Newport on the old Peters homestead, such as the ones below, hung with food for the birds at Lauritzen Gardens. (This kind of juniper is now considered a weed in Nebraska pastures and is turning my home landscape dark.) I didn't run into the most popular Christmas choice now, Scotch pine, until I was teaching at WIU in the late 1960s in Macomb, Illinois, and discovered Christmas tree farms along the Mississippi for the first time, so thrilled that I sped across Iowa on I-80 at 80 mph with a Christmas tree in the passenger seat taking up most of that half of my car, a bit late for the folks and my then-little sisters but a real, live tree I had picked out, not something cut weeks, months earlier and shipped long distances. Childhood magic persisted. And I still love the scent and miss it.
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