Christmas Memories, Old and New

Sometimes at night, when I'm trying to fall asleep, I run through memories in my mind. I pick a time and a place and cast up everything I can remember about them, like going on tour of my past. I started doing this when I was around ten when we moved from our house on Bridge Street in New Cumberland, to a new home in Ohio. I was afraid of forgetting things, so I played them back in my brain over and over again to fix them in my memory. With each successive move in my life, I've added another set of memories to run through. Now I have many chapters to choose from. For a long time I would run through the places I lived in Japan, the names of the Hankyu train stations between Osaka and Kobe. Lately, I find my nocturnal mental rambles pulled more and more to the earliest times from my first awareness of being alive to the age of ten, and during this season, especially to Christmases past. Perhaps performing these mental ramblings as I'm falling asleep has added a dreamlike quality to them. Recalling them brings a special sweet aching to my heart.

Our house on Bridge Street, where we lived until I was ten, was three stories tall plus a basement. The first floor, the ground floor, was my father's office. We lived on the second floor. Grandma and Grandad Rathfon and cousin Rick lived on the third floor. The basement was divided into two halves. One side was utilitarian containing furnaces, water heaters, and storage. The other half was finished. It had a fireplace, a tiled floor with a built-in shuffleboard court, furniture, a piano, two pump organs, and the massive pool table. We kept Christmas in the basement. That's where we set up our Christmas tree. That's where we hung our stockings. That's where we opened presents on Christmas morning. That's where we held our family Christmas party on Christmas night.

The house on Bridge Street.

My memories of those times are rich with details, but the years have tended to blend them into a lump, a sort of amalgamated memory. I can see all of the little bits that fit together to make up the whole, but sometimes not the specific years they belong to. For instance, I'm sure we had some snowless Christmases back then, but in my memories, it always snowed at Christmas. In those days the streets and houses were decorated with lights and garlands, and on lawns here and there, those plastic light-up nativities, Santa, carolers, and reindeer. Our street was festooned with strings of garland and lights. Across the river in Harrisburg, Market Street was a wonderland of lights and the window displays at Bowman's and Pomeroy's department stores were magical. My father always took us to a store in Lemoyne called Joe, the Motorists' Friend to see Santa Claus. We got a little pin and a candy cane for sitting on his lap. The store had an amazing model train display. We loved to watch it go on its track around the store. One year, we got a Lionel train set for Christmas that we set up on the pool table. I can still conjure up the warm electric smell of it.

The windows on the first floor front of our house were decorated with strings lights alternating red and green, and plastic holly garland. I still have a bit of that garland. It's almost seventy years old and very brittle. We put it up every year and each year a bit more of it falls off and is thrown away. Someday there won't be any of it left. Maybe it will prove to be like the grandfather clock in the song that ticked as long as its owner lived. Maybe when the last leaf falls, so will I. That's a rather mortal thought to tint such a happy association.

The last little bit of the old holly garland.

Christmas 1966: (left to right) Mindy, Nancy, Steve holding Jaynan, Me, Hollie.

Our stockings in 1966: (left to right) Hollie, Me, Steve, Nancy, Mindy, Jaynan.
Jaynan arrived after my mother got those Santa stockings, so hers is different.

I still have two of those stockings, mine on the left, Hollie's on the right.

In 1965, Kodak introduced the Super 8 camera and my father had one right from the beginning. He was notorious for taking movies and forgetting to turn the light on so they were too dark or to take the lens cap off so there was nothing there at all. But he did take some movies that I cherish, scenes from a time and place I love. Here are some clips from Christmas Day and Christmas Night in 1965 and 1966. The first part is Christmas morning 1965. My family and Grandma Rathfon and cousin Rick are there. My mother is pregnant with my sister Jaynan, who would be born the following March. Steve got a toy rifle. I'm the kid in the red shirt. Later that morning my Aunt Joyce and Uncle Bob Greenawalt and my cousins Bobby Ann and Micki came with gifts. The snowman on the table you see was a game. It was covered in spikes and we threw styrofoam balls at it. The missionaries also came by. Later we went to visit Nana, our grandmother Howe, in the nursing home where she lived. She had Parkinson's disease. The next scenes are from our Christmas Night party when we gathered with our Rathfon family. That year it was at Uncle Bob and Aunt Esther's house. We had a grab bag gift exchange. My uncles loved to give gag gifts. Uncle Bob got a Brylcreem box (a little dab will do ya) with a naked doll inside because the TV commercial showed a lady emerging from a tube of Brylcreem. Next the scene changes to Christmas morning 1966. Jaynan is now nine months old. Christmas was on Sunday that year, that's why we are all dressed up. Later Aunt Joyce and cousin Micki are there. Then there is the Christmas Night party with lots of overly energetic cousins. Uncle Bud got a Mad Magazine. He loved Mad Magazine. The game Twister came out that year and we got one. You can see my mother and Aunt Esther playing it. At the end of the party my dad filmed everyone leaving – Grandad and Grandma Rathfon and cousin Rick; Uncle Bob and Aunt Esther with cousins Lori, Linda, Karen, Rob, and baby Preston; Uncle Bud and Aunt Dolly with cousins Ron, Chris, and baby Amy. Then Uncle Bob took the camera and filmed my family and, last of all, my dad waving good-bye. Stacey helped me put this clip together and added the music. What happy memories!

I think most people have a time that they think of as their Childhood Golden Era. I do and mine is these years through the late 60s when I was young and innocent, or at least naïve. When I lived in a world that I understood because I didn't know very much. I lived in my own little kingdom in a house, in a neighborhood, in a town that I loved. Around me I had a family with parents, siblings, grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins. It was a stable and predictable world. At certain times in the year, especially at Christmastime, things always happened just as they should. Every year we watched Christmas specials on our black and white television set that got three channels, ABC, NBC, and CBS – Mr. Magoo's Christmas Carol (1962), Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer (1964), A Charlie Brown Christmas (1965), and How the Grinch Stole Christmas (1966). They only aired once a year, and if you missed them, that was too bad, so we never missed them. Every year we had a Christmas party at church. Every year we had a family party on Christmas night. Every year we sang the familiar carols and songs. Every year we ate the expected cookies – sand tarts, peanut butter blossoms, Alverda's cookies, thumbprint cookies, and Russian tea cookies – and other Christmas treats like candy canes, ribbon candy, and clear toys. The world was wonderful at Christmastime.

1960s TV Christmas specials.

Sand tarts, peanut butter blossoms, Russian tea cookies.

Candy canes, ribbon candy, clear toys.

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On Monday we got our Christmas tree. This year we departed from our traditional 8' Canaan Fir and got an 8' Korean Fir. This is the first year the tree farm had Korean Firs big enough to sell.  It's a very pretty tree. The undersides of the needles are bluish green. We brought it into the living room and unwrapped it and let it relax while we ate dinner. Then Miriam and Hannah put up the lights. They have a system and I don't interfere with it. We only had time for the lights that night. The ornaments had to wait until Wednesday evening.

Our tree being baled for transport.

Unwrapped and relaxing.

The lights are on.

On Tuesday morning it was -14° when I got up. I didn't want to go outside, but I had a doctor's appointment in Port Allegany. That appointment, plus some errands while I was out and about, took up almost the whole day. I got home in time to do the chores and by then it had started to snow.

We had a winter storm arrive during Tuesday night and on into the day on Wednesday. It wasn't too bad, but it was snowy enough that I canceled my acupuncture appointment for that morning. By the afternoon, the snow was deep enough and heavy enough to slide off the roof. Great sheets of it fell with muffled thuds all through the afternoon. With the snow coming down and a houseful of Christmas songs, I spent an hour getting things ready to decorate the tree that evening. The ornaments are stored in a big trunk upstairs and I had to carry all the boxes down a few at a time. We have a lot of ornaments.

Staging up to decorate the tree.

That evening after dinner, we decorated the tree. It takes us a long time to hang up ornaments. We like to discuss each one's origin and significance. My special task is putting on the bead strings at the end.

Decorating.

Hanging the bead strings.

All done.

Thursday morning I set out to buy some bales of straw from our friend Rhoda Lent. The Fosters needed them for their chicken coop next door. I took Kurt's pickup truck. There was almost a foot of new snow on the ground from the storm we were in the midst of. It was snowing a bit as I left, but the sun was trying to break through and I didn't think there would be any problem. Rhoda's farm is up on Sweden Hill. I played it safe and took the roads I knew would be plowed. I forgot that Sweden Hill pretty much has its own weather system. It was snowing hard up there. There is a lot of open farmland and with the wind, the snow was drifting deeply and quickly across the road. I got to Rhoda's okay, but the plows had pushed a bank of snow across the opening of her driveway. I thought, I'm in a big pickup truck, it won't be a problem. It was a problem. The truck is two-wheel drive. It hit the bank and got stuck with the back end still out on the road. I tried everything I could to get it to go backward or forward with no success. Rhoda wasn't home, but she had the bales waiting for me in her barn. I loaded them, hoping the extra weight would help free the truck. Nope. There isn't much traffic on that road, which was good and bad. I didn't have to worry about someone coming by and clipping the back of the truck, but it also meant no one was likely to drive by anytime soon that could help me. I called Stacey at work to see what I should do. She had some workers out and about and said she would contact them and get them to rescue me. Before she could do that, two men in pickups stopped. One of them was our friend Randy who remodeled our kitchen last summer. We hooked one of those trucks up to my truck and with some effort, pulled me free. I took the safest roads home. When I got back to Gold, I knew the truck would not make it up the farmhouse driveway, so I parked it at our house and tried hauling the bales next door on a sled. The center of gravity was too high, the sled was too shallow, and the snow was too deep. After dropping a bale every five feet, I gave up and stacked them on the back porch. Someone better equipped will have to do the rest. So my morning turned out to be a bigger adventure than I expected. Way too big. And I think the truck will have to stay in our driveway until spring now.

Thursday morning during a brief lull in our winter storm.

That storm finally let up during the night on Thursday. When I got up on Friday morning, the sky was ablaze with stars and a bright quarter moon shining low in the west. There was a foot and a half of snow on the ground and it was 7°. I went out at sunrise to fill the bird feeders. The chickadees were waiting impatiently for me. Then I started the cars and brushed off the snow for those who were leaving for work, which was everyone but me. I was home alone all day, which meant a long queue of Christmas music at high volume while perusing seed catalogs and websites and making a wish list and dreaming of gardens. It's a very long list right now and it will get even longer as more catalogs arrive in the mail. At some point I'll start to compare prices and eliminate most of the items. Sometime in February I will finalize the list and place my orders.

Sunrise on Friday.

Friday night was pizza night. Our oven is broken, so Sarah made the crusts at her house and brought them over to finish here in our little convection oven. We had a nice evening together with the Fosters.

Saturday was the usual day filled with errands. Stacey and I left the house at 7:45 and drove to Westfield to pick up our meat from the butcher. Our two big pigs, one with a hanging weight of 217 pounds and the other at 175 pounds, resulted in eight boxes of meat – hams, ribs, roasts, bacon, and sausage. I also got the leaf lard, which I will render sometime in the new year. The hams will provide Christmas and Easter dinners. The roast will be our New Years feast. The bacon and sausage will keep us happy all winter long.

Boxes from the butcher.

When we got home from that, we packed the meat in the freezer and set out again. This time we drove up to Wellsville to the chapel where we met up with our friends the Felips to put up and decorate a Christmas tree in the hallway of the chapel. Then we cleaned the chapel to get it ready for the Sabbath.

The Christmas tree at the chapel.

I was concerned about the weather. The forecast was varied depending on which source I looked at, but there was the possibility for snow during the night between Saturday and Sunday. I sent out a message to the branch members earlier in the week telling them that, if the roads were bad on Sunday morning, I would cancel church. We have a lot of older members and I don't want them risking injury out of their faithfulness in coming to church. I went out at 6:30 this morning to check the conditions. It had snowed, but not very much. The road looked okay. I didn't cancel church.

Our meetings were good. On the drive home it was snowing, but it was very fine snow, like ice dust. With the sun trying to break through, it was like driving through sparkling fog. Miriam and Hannah are singing in their final Christmas concert this afternoon. This one is down in Galeton. Stacey and I will be leaving for that in a bit.

On the drive home from church.

Tonight is the beginning of Hanukkah. We like Hanukkah and have adopted some of its customs. We don't keep it for seven days and eight nights, usually just one. We will tell the story of the miracle of the temple menorah in 168 B.C. We have a menorah and we'll light the candles, but we light them all on the first night. We'll sing the few Hanukkah songs we know, two to be exact. We'll eat traditional oily treats in the Hanukkah tradition. We're having latkes, fried potato pancakes. We should also be eating sufganiyot, jelly-filled donuts, but we didn't have time to prepare them so we're opting for an easier alternative – sopapillas, Mexican fried bread, not jelly-filled but almost a donut and still fried, so it counts. We'll play dreidel. The Shilligs are coming over for tonight's festivities. We like adding one more celebration to the holiday season. Besides, as a good Jewish boy, Jesus most likely observed Hanukkah, although he wouldn't have played dreidel since it wasn't invented until the Middle Ages, and he didn't eat latkes because potatoes didn't come to the Old World until the 16th century, and I doubt he ate jelly-filled donuts or sopapillas. But we will and it will be great.

Our dreidels.

Our Christmas knickknacks and our menorah.

Happy Hanukkah! and Good Sabbath!