While I was thinking about going to Gramma's house--not over the river and through the woods but by gravel roads through snowdrifts in a car--never did get to ride in a sleigh--I was thinking how busy those weeks before Christmas were even for a child. We exchanged names at school and Sunday school, besides giving our teachers at both places gifts. For the most part, in her campaign to make sure I was always independent, Mom left the selection and wrapping up to me. Of course, we also made gifts at school for our parents, one of the few I can recall a very early one, plaster casts of our hands with red ribbons for hanging. Our grade room in elementary school was festooned with the usual holiday construction-paper cut-outs in the windows (not the kits teachers buy today), the tree (one of those local cedars) with mostly our hand-made chains of red and green construction paper (white paste to eat), circles of paper glued together in threes or fours, colored to represent balls (more white paste to eat), snowflakes of paper doilies or multi-folded paper carefully cut into and then opened up, strings of cranberries and popcorn--and we made all those for Gram too, which kept us grandchildren busy on pre-Christmas visits. I was in programs at school and church, meaning pieces to learn, and we usually had to learn songs, a different one for each class. As I got older, I was always a magi in the church program because Dad had a wonderfully rich-looking maroon-with-red-pattern dress robe of satin. When Mom taught country school, I got drafted for much more, of course, with the decorating, sacking of candies and nuts as treats for those who came, making programs.
Shopping in Norfolk meant several in a car, neighbors or relatives, not some quick excursion solo as now, since this was special and roads not that good. Stores then weren't open on Sundays, were only open one or two nights a week until a week or so before the 25th, with department stores and dime stores prime destinations, no big franchises like Wal-Mart, Hobby Lobby, Home Depot then. I liked Montgomery Wards in Norfolk, then on Fifth Street north of Hotel Madison and the Norfolk Daily News, because it had nice restrooms and was across from the police station, next to which was an open space that, in good weather, had caged monkeys. I mentioned Sioux City in the previous entry, the really big city where we ordinarily went only with such as the Petersons (the county attorney's family) and always ate at a then quality restaurant, the Green Gables. I was most enchanted with all the glittering colored lights, far more than Norfolk had, including the huge stylized cat on the Katz Drug Store outlined in blinking red bulbs, the dime stores of three floors rather than just one, department stores of five and six stories, and parking garages. And Santas all over the place.
I will simply add a note here, as I've written before, I was not a fan of Santa if he was within ten feet or less. Between the blustery laugh and the obscuring beard, he was better in advertisements than up close and personal. I generally ran, crying, from him even as I heard nasty rumors from bigger kids who the Jolly Horror was. In the church it was possible to circle away from him or crawl under the pews; I did both. Indeed, after I hid, sobbing, under Gramma's buffet one Christmas, Uncle Larry had to come back in and take off his disguise to get me to stop. (Audree's kids were always more cynically knowing.) I felt the irony years later when I was asked to belt pillows on and don the beard and suit to play Santa with whiskers in my mouth for the church or families, the most successful time for Hahn High School on the Wayne State campus where I was practice teaching and refused to talk so that the students never guessed who I was.
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