Memories of Past Christmases

My memories of Christmases when I was a small child include my Mother and her homemade gifts – she made fruitcakes (the kind people loved to receive and eat!) and divinity. I’ll never forget watching her cooking the mixture until the little ball formed so she could take it off the stove and finish whipping it up. Her divinity was the best. Every year she baked for friends, the newspaper carriers and the mailman.

As I grew older, I learned we were considered fairly poor in my small hometown – I didn’t know it as a child because I had everything I needed - a roof over my head (the house was small and old—always needed a bit of fixing up), clothes to wear (mostly hand-me-downs and rummage-sale items) and lots of food to eat. For Christmas I always got a new doll complete with its own new wardrobe that my Mother somehow had been able to sew without my knowing about it. Every year my Father would give me and my two brothers each a silver dollar! We thought we were rich! One Christmas we three each received a brand new sled from my grandparents! We lived on a street that sloped downhill for over two blocks in each direction (our house was at the top of the slope)—my Mother despaired of the fact that we would slide across the intersecting streets without stopping! It was especially fun when there was a coating of ice on the street. Sometimes the City would block off a street with a good downhill run so that the sledding was safer for the kids in my neighborhood.

We always opened our gifts on Christmas Eve – always! A family tradition started way back before I was born. We would get together again on Christmas Day at one relative’s home or another and have a huge holiday meal! On occasion, friends from out of town or who lived in the country would come into town and spend Christmas Day with us. As I got older, I was confirmed into the church (the only one in my family who took this step) and went to Christmas Eve services – they always let me open my gifts first so I could attend the service. At the service all the children were given fruit – the biggest oranges, apples and grapefruit that I had ever seen in my whole life! I just wanted to look at them – not eat them or share them when I got home. But, I finally did when convinced they would get rotten and have to be thrown away if we didn’t eat them first.

Every Christmas there would be snow. Every Christmas it would be cold. Our old house was warmed by a single gas stove situated in our dining room – in my room above, there was a hole in the floor covered by an ornamental grate (so that I wouldn’t fall through) that would let some heat into the room. When it was really cold, you almost had to stand right over the hole to feel any heat. Many times, I woke in the mornings to find ice had formed on the inside of the windows. Many times we went to bed with stoneware jugs filled with hot water and wrapped in a towel to warm our feet. I remember doing my schoolwork at the kitchen counter to be warm when my Mother was cooking or baking. I thought this was all normal – at no time did I ever consider anyone being better off than we were – I grew up happy, even with the usual squabbling and bickering with my brothers as happens between siblings in the majority of families. Life seemed so much simpler then....