A Ghost from Christmas Past

     There are some things about Christmas as a kid that pop out immediately when I stop to think about that magical time. You remember, just when you are pretty sure that Santa is your parents but don’t really want to take the chance of letting them know you know and messing up a pretty good thing that’s worked out well for the past several years. One of the things I miss most about way back then - other than being a kid with no idea what responsibilities were waiting on me later - was that the Christmas season wasn’t so blatantly in-your-face commercial and didn’t start the day after Halloween, and the stores didn’t put up decorations and trees until at least after Thanksgiving.  

    Our parents had a few things that they did as Christmas traditions at our house that we didn’t really understand but just went along with. Why, for example, there were hard candies in little decorative bowls that mysteriously appeared in mid-December. I don’t remember them being available at any other time of year. Along with the hard candies were the assorted nuts in their shells with the little package of metal picks and instruments of torture that closely resembled dentist tools to help remove the nuts from their shells. Most of the injuries were thankfully addressed by the application of a band aid or two, but occasionally Mama had to bring out the dreaded mercurochrome and that ended the nut cracking season for at least one of us.  Brothers were not likely to share what they shelled, injury or no. Pecans were comparatively easy, but you had to watch out for the bitter part between the two halves that was almost enough to make you give up nuts altogether if you ate even the tiniest piece. Walnuts were a little more difficult and using the little metal picks to extract a tiny broken off piece deep inside an almost hidden part of the shell was pretty dangerous if your fine motor skills and discernment were still under development. The nutcracker device was only dangerous if your brother’s fingers got caught in it, and that only happened a time or two when they weren’t really paying attention. Inattention was dangerous if brothers were around, or so I hear. The only plus for parents I can think of for this activity was it kept us mostly quiet and involved for a little while, it began to teach us the risk/reward conundrum we would face daily as adults, and it served pretty much the same function as a cell phone or an iPad for a kid today with an added touch of danger and the possibility of injury.   Brazil nuts were all but impossible, and the effort used to hammer them into submission was hardly worth the reward, but they were there, I decided, both to teach us patience and that some things were easier if you let someone else do it for you and to buy the bag already shelled. I never understood why peanuts were never a part of the nut collection…maybe it was because there was no challenge or danger to peanuts.

     Around that same time of year apples, oranges and assorted fruits would also appear in uncounted hundreds, and nobody seemed to ever mind how many we ate (or partially ate), and our yard seemed littered with apple cores and little pieces of orange or nectarine peel and even the occasional grape stem or two. We never understood why our parents seemed to think these were essential Christmas items, but like the tree and the gifts on Christmas morning we didn’t question it too closely and just enjoyed it while it lasted. I’m guessing all of you compared yours with the navel of a navel orange just to see if the name was appropriately given. I don’t remember spending a lot of time questioning why some things at our house were associated with Christmas because, quite frankly, the good stuff far outweighed any bad, and as a kid we tended not to question too closely the things we enjoyed the most.

     Being out of school for a couple of weeks was a joyful feeling, and the last few days of class seemed like they lasted for weeks.  Those last long school days before the holidays did give us time to look through the Sears catalog toy section and strategically leave pictures or hints around the house of the stuff we wanted. I was pretty sure I was sneaky about the whole process, including my letters to Santa, but Mama told me later we couldn’t have been more obvious if we’d been naked and painted ourselves with neon body paint.  

     We made plans with the other kids for marathon baseball and basketball and football games that in reality lasted for an hour or so before somebody had to go visit Aunt Sally or someone else had to help clean up the house, or even worse, someone got tackled and got grass stains on their school clothes, but what we really concentrated on and schemed for and thought about was searching for the Christmas gifts we were pretty sure were hidden in places we weren’t supposed to find.  It always seemed that, despite our planning and devious thinking the only time we really discovered gifts were by accident. My brother Jay once saw an Evel Knievel motorcycle toy he had asked Santa for in the trunk of the car when Mama had a flat.  I was searching feverishly for my regulation leather football Mama had hidden from me because I accidentally threw it to my brother in the living room and - depending on whether you believed my story about him flubbing the catch or his story about my errant throw - one of us broke a lamp. In my search of the upper levels of closets and kitchen cabinets for the football Mama hid I found several wrapped presents that I wasn’t supposed to find. Since there were no adults around at the moment to tell me no and no brothers around to snitch on me later, I thought I could carefully, carefully undo a piece of scotch tape and get a peek at what was inside.  What was inside was, of course, a box, so I peeled back a little more tape and tore the wrapping again and had to cut the box with a pair of Mama’s scissors, accidentally tore more of the wrapping and the box and, much to my disappointment, found a brand-new pack of Fruit of the Loom tighty whiteys in my size. When Mama later placed it under the tree, I did notice her looking suspiciously at the corner where I had tried to rewrap it, but since she already knew what it was and who it was for apparently thought I was sufficiently chastened by my surreptitious discovery of underwear for all of my efforts.  I was.  It broke me from looking for more presents for at least three days.  It also, at a relatively early age, began a slow learning process with just how karma worked. 

     About two weeks before Christmas Mama would usually mention that it was about time for us to get a tree. Only a real one would do, and we had discovered a spot in the woods behind our house that was appropriately named “The Christmas Tree patch.” It and the treehouse were cardinal compass points when giving other kids directions to anywhere else in the woods, and we were convinced we could find a perfect tree for our house there if we got Mama’s OK.  She was skeptical, but finally relented and we walked the ½ mile or so to the spot carrying Boy Scout hatchets, 2 pocketknives, one of Daddy’s hand saws, a tape measure, a rope, a paper bag of fruit and a canteen. Mama had given us strict instructions that the tree could be no taller than 6 or 7 feet, but triangulation was way beyond us then and the only way we figured out to measure with our tape measure was to cut one down. The first one we cut down, with a much greater expenditure of effort than we expected, was a measly five feet tall, but the second one turned out to be the one we wanted, and it only took us 2 hours or so to cut it down and drag it back to the house. Mama didn’t complain about the rather scraggly look it had acquired after being drug through the woods home, and she even let us try to fit the metal tree stand on the bottom. After an hour of sawing and chopping and pruning and fighting tree sap and sawing again we finally got the stand on the tree and her ok to move it into the house.  It wasn’t quite straight up and down and had a definite bald spot where it had been dragged through the woods, but she helped us put it in a corner of the room so the bare side wouldn’t be so noticeable. We were very proud of our contribution to the family Christmas, and I’m pretty sure Mama warned all the other adults not to be critical. Daddy’s response was predictable when he came home from work. He saw the tree in the corner and said - before Mama could warn him where it came from - “what the hell is that?”

     Decorating the tree always followed the same pattern: Daddy would bring in all the boxes and bags of ornaments and lights and tinsel, try to untangle the lights from the mess they had been left in the year before, and get frustrated and decide he had to get away from the madness. He would go outside and smoke a cigarette; it wasn’t that he didn’t smoke inside, but I think from time to time he let the deadly combination of stressful situations and us overwhelm him and he had to have a time out. We eventually got the lights untangled and had them circling the tree pretty evenly at the bottom, but the top few strands were a little haphazard because we weren’t tall enough to reach them. Daddy helped straighten them out but left again when we had to search for the one light that was burned out that had to be replaced before the rest would work.  We continued the decorating process by placing the ornaments carefully on the little hooks and on the branches at first, but not so carefully that we didn’t usually break 2 or 3 before we were done.  The last part was my favorite - throwing the tinsel on the tree and trying not to get it stuck in clumps.  It was harder than you might think.  One year Daddy had a couple of cans of artificial snow he wanted added to the tree.  It didn’t work as advertised and was pretty difficult to get out of the littlest brother’s hair.

     About a week before Christmas most of our relatives would descend on our house - we were centrally located - and the smell of fruit cake, divinity, cookies and chicken and dressing and turkey and whatever that jello stuff was with the grapes in it and sausage balls and green bean casserole and yeast rolls and pecan pies and sweet potato pies and cranberry sauce…I could go on, but you get the idea, filled the house for days. The meal itself seemed rather anticlimactic, but we all enjoyed it and the uncles leaned back and loosened their belts and pronounced it great. All of us gathered in the living room by OUR tree and gifts were handed out.  It always started slowly but picked up speed as we got past the littlest kids and to us older ones.  Afterwards, all the kids over age 4 went outside to play, but the adults seemed satisfied with sitting around the table and talking. The air was full of cigarette smoke, and somebody was always emptying the ashtrays and Uncle Roy’s bottle of bourbon with a shot glass was on the counter and there were maybe 20 or so adults altogether. I could never figure out what they were talking about that was so interesting until I was 25 or so and they let me sit around and listen. I wish I had written down what they said - it was all about their families and growing up and Christmases past. Now I see the attraction and learned why we had the hard candies and fruit and nuts. 

     For a couple of nights there were pallets everywhere and the adults got all the beds, but we didn’t mind.  A pallet was an adventure, and we were allowed to stay up late and play games and eat more dessert and any leftovers we wanted and watch tv until it went off the air and nobody tried to tell us we couldn’t have another dessert or two and the adults never seemed to get tired of talking around the table and didn’t bother - much - to check on us.  It was kid heaven. 

     Sunday we were allowed to skip church to see all the relatives off, and family goodbyes usually lasted a couple of hours or so before we got everybody off and on the way home. I think Mama started immediately on Christmas dinner for us, and we enjoyed the last few days before Christmas and began our prayers for snow to cancel the beginning of school after New Year’s.  

     Christmas Eve we always had a couple of Daddy’s friends and their wives over, and I figured out later that our parents didn’t mind sharing us and the event with them.  That, and Daddy probably needed help if there were any toys to put together. The adults again sat around the table, and we didn’t. Around 10, after watching the Rudoph Christmas special or Charlie Brown and listening to Daddy singing “Fraulein” in the kitchen 5 or 6 or 12 times (that’s the only song he knew on guitar and we knew all the words and were able to sing along from the other room), we were sent to bed with instructions to go to sleep because Santa wouldn’t come until we did. I tried valiantly to stay awake, but it never worked. You know the rest, and one of us usually woke up around 4 or 5am and got the others up with the excited shouts and we entered the living room lit only by the lights of the tree and the sparkle of the glitter and light reflecting off the tinsel on the tree and the angel on top and the shiny wrapping on the presents. Presents were everywhere and there seemed to be thousands, and Daddy didn’t even complain about it being “too damn early” and I can still see the picture in my mind all these years later. Good ole Santa (or whoever) had come through again. I overheard Daddy say to Mama “this makes all of it worth it, don’t it Dorthy?” I tried to figure out if he meant having kids or giving them presents, and decided the answer was yes it does, Daddy. Yes it does.