When Charles Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol In Prose, Being a Ghost Story of Christmas (the full title) in 1843, he chose to make the least frightening of his apparitions the Ghost of Christmas Past. That makes sense. Christmas memories tend toward the sweet.
(There are exceptions. I remember one Christmas Eve at a radio network, when for want of news to cover the assembled newscasters and newswriters compared their worst Christmas memories. In radio, as in some other industries, someone has to be on duty all the time, so the tales had to do with being cut off from friends and family, being alone in some isolated radio station. The ever-cheerful Kevin Gordon told of getting home after a long and lonely Christmas shift and finding he had nothing in the house to eat but fish sticks and peas. John McConnell remembered the Christmas when he was stuck at WOR Radio and received a call from a girlfriend who had been scheduled to come to New York to see him; her news was sorry, she’d found someone else. But these are exceptions.)
I didn’t know it at the time, because I assumed every family observed Christmas the same way, but there are very individual traditions that seem at the heart of holiday memories.
For instance, there was a rule established and enforced by my father having to do with the Christmas tree and Christmas lights. The tree would be acquired and the lights untangled, excoriated until the bad bulb was found, and hung from the gutters exactly one week before Christmas. They would be taken down and the tree undecorated on New Year’s Day. Period.
For a time we would get live trees, their roots encased in burlap, that after the spring thaw would get planted; the last time I went past the old homestead I saw that some of them are still there after more than 40 years, huge now and not looking at all like Christmas trees. This semi-tradition was interrupted by the purchase of a shiny tinsel tree, the branches stored plume-like in paper tubes 50 weeks of the year. It was assembled by sticking the branches in holes in a vertical silver-painted broomstick; the whole thing was them illuminated by a rotating red-yellow-blue-green light that resembled the faces of the monsters in the old War of the Worlds movie. We only had it for a few years, and what I remember most was how it felt to pull the branches from their tubes, the whooshing noise they made.
When we had a real tree, the decorating festivities would involve my grandparents, who lived next door, and the stringing of cranberries to put on the tree, and the manufacture of popcorn (which would also be strung in a tradition that makes no sense to me — did we want mice in the Christmas tree?). Some of the popcorn was salted then magically joined with white Karo syrup to make popcorn balls that are always good but that are unsurpassed when still warm and sticky.
The weeks leading up to Christmas, which I remember as being cold and clear and snow-covered even though they weren’t always, uncluded my father disappearing after supper to work on some secret project — he built Christmas presents sometimes — and my mom crocheting, making endless potholder-sized squares that would be joined to make afghans for friends under some obscure provision of Christmas law which allows for Christmas presents that do not actually have to be completed until sometime the following March.
There was each year the neighborhood Christmas party, which was a joy in that school had been out for awhile and we’d get to see each other. It was always held at a nearby church and would center around the eating of food — some of the neighbor ladies had specialties, often involving unnatural things done to Jell-O — to which we had year after year become accustomed. Christmas carols were sung and there would be Santa Claus and it was wonderful.
On Christmas Eve, it was the midnight church service which my sisters and I attended because it let us stay up very late so sleep would come easily. It was a solemn service until midnight, whereupon the organist, a funny little German man named Heinz Arnold, would haul off and play the loudest “Joy to the World” you ever heard, and the congregation would jump to its feet in song, and the bell would be rung, It was the most cheerful moment ever.
It’s difficult not to go on and on, about the Christmas tradition of no presents being opened or even looked at until after everyone had eaten breakfast — including my grandparents, the slowest eaters in the world — and my continuing objection to those (including my father and my mother’s mother) who believed that the appropriate Christmas dinner comprised: a goose.
But maybe it’s better instead to marvel at memory, how the passage of time, like blowing sand in the desert, tends to soften the sharp edges, to round things off and streamline them and make them, maybe, just a little prettier than they might have seemed at the time.
And, during this season, to be glad that time does that.
Dennis E. Powell is crackpot-at-large to Open for Business. Powell was an award-winning reporter in New York and elsewhere before moving to Ohio and becoming a full-time crackpot. You can reach him at dep@drippingwithirony.com.