Christmas was the most exciting holiday of the year, followed only by the Fourth of July and birthdays. The earliest Christmas that I remember was 1951 or 1952, when I was four or five years old. The four of us, Vake, Milly, Sandy and I, trekked to Portland to catch the “Streamliner,” the sleek diesel train to Chicago, where we would spend Christmas with Milly’s parents in the Midwest. We had a berth, and when I awakened during the night and saw snow on the ground, I started singing “Winter Wonderland.” Vake and Milly awakened and shut me up so that the other passengers on the train could rest.
In Chicago, Milly and Vake saw an electric train in a store window that had been marked down for sale as a “demonstrator,” and had it shipped to our home in Coos Bay, OR. After that, it was brought out of the closet one time per year, at Christmas time, and ran in a circle under our Christmas tree.
The Christmas season started at school, where lesson plans suddenly made room for making paper chains out of red and green construction paper, and out of popcorn. Mrs. Hansen, third and fourth grade, taught us to make spiked balls that we called “Polish Porcupines.” Another teacher had us cover a small inflated balloon with paper mache’ made from strips on newspaper dipped in paste. When it was dried and decorated, it became a piggy bank to give our parents for Christmas. Mom used hers to collect of the dimes out of her purse and Vake’ pocket change. She spent the dimes to buy antique oak furniture.
At school, we each drew the name of one classmate to whom we would give an inexpensive gift—the year I was in the 8th grade, everybody gave everybody the 45-rpm record of “Telstar,” a musical top hit named for an early communications satellite. The music teacher taught us to sing traditional carols: “Silent Night,” “O Little Town of Bethlehem,” “We Three Kings of Orient Are,” and livelier, slightly more secular tunes, like “Deck the Halls With Boughs of Holly,” “Merry Old King Wenceslas,” and “ Little Drummer Boy.” At home, each tune, and more, played on the radio, and we could listen to Handel’s “Messiah” on a 33-rpm recording. Oops, the music just stopped. You have to turn the record over to hear the end of the performance, to get to the Halleluiah Chorus.
The Mulholland children came from a Jewish mother, but she never advised them of why she, a Hungarian, was raised by Catholic nuns in France, then sent to the Dominican Republic, until her children were in high school and past the Christmas party age. I’m sure there were no Muslims or Buddhists or Sikhs in Florence, Oregon, at all, let alone those with kids in school whose religious beliefs needed to be accounted for. Kwanza was unknown, but there were no black children in Florence, either. However, I’m sure there were Seventh Day Adventists who were not supposed to attend school parties. I think they were simply left out.
Next it was time to visit Santa Claus. As a tyke in Coos Bay, I remember seeing Santa at a department store, and being bashful, until I noticed that he was wearing shiny black wing-tipped dress shoes like those our old Finn neighbor Emil Lind would wear, then he seemed less threatening. In the ‘70s, we would have called them “Shiny black FBI shoes.” After we moved to Florence, we visited Santa at Uncle John’s Western Auto Store. I sat on his lap and asked for a harp. What I had in mind was the golden harp that Jack stole from the giant in “Jack and the beanstalk.” Milly was puzzled, and asked me, “Did you mean a mouth harp?” I mumbled that I guessed so, and so I received a harmonica, among other gifts, that Christmas.
Many years later, a black friend who had grown up in east Texas in the 1940s and 1950s told me that Santa Claus at the department store was for white kids, only. I was stricken by the utter cruelty of depriving any starry-eyed tyke of the thrill of talking to Santa, then waiting to see if some special wish came true at Christmas time. When I was working for the City of Seattle, I saw Santa walking down the halls of City Hall, ho-hoing, being chased by a young black attorney who completely forgot any decorum, who came running and calling after him, “Santa! Santa!” and who bounced around him as excited as a puppy. Santa greeted him warmly. I was glad I saw that, and wished in some way that it could atone for slights in the past.
There was the church pageant. At Sunday School at the Evangelical United Brethren Church, each child was assigned a couplet to memorize. On the night of the pageant, each dressed up in Sunday School finery, marched across the stage, and recited his or her lines in the assigned order. To me, it was always confusing—I had no idea of what the lines meant, had no idea what lines others were saying, had no overview of what was going on. No matter, there was a reward: after the pageant, each child was handed a little paper bag of candy. It held a full-sized candy cane, some hard candies, and a few chocolate truffles of the sort that were sold by the bin full at the M&I Variety Store.
We collected our Christmas tree from the woods, with all four kids trailing after Vake. Often, we walked along the edge of the sand dunes starting at the Rod and Gun Club shooting range off Munsel Lake Road. We would choose a bushy pine that would just about reach the ceiling in the living room, and cut it down. Vake might cut a few extra boughs from nearby trees, too, then drill holes in the trunk of our chosen tree and plug in the extra branches to fill in any scant parts. He built a base by cutting two pieces of lumber each about three feet long, crossing them in their centers, nailing them together, and cutting and nailing feet onto the top board of the cross, so it would sit flat on the floor and not wobble. Finally, he drilled a hole into the center of the cross, inserted the tree, and voila! That was the base. Sandy and I decorated the tree, starting with lights, then adding Milly’s collection of glass and plastic ornaments, but only above the “high water line” where Mark and Tina couldn’t reach, until they were old enough to leave well enough alone. Then the cat took to batting the ornaments. Milly added the finishing touch, foil tinsel, dressing the tree from tip to bottom in a silver shower.
Some years we added other decorations to the living room. Artificial snow sprayed onto the windows. A bare branch of a Manzanita bush was spray painted silver and hung with glass balls. As first graders, each of us had had our handprints impressed into a saucer of plaster of Paris that was fitted with an ornament hanger, then dried and painted gold and sent home for our parents for Christmas. Four handprints hung across the living room wall—Mark’s was the biggest.
Always, there were home-made cookies—sugar cookies cut into bells or circles and decorated with colored frosting, decorated gingerbread boys, and scotch shortbread made from a simple recipe of nothing but butter, sugar and flour. The tiny, messy vials of food coloring always contained a yellow, and you could mix a drop of the yellow with a drop of the blue and get a green that over time always dressed a gingerbread boy in U of O colors, and one year, when his neck got stretched, a gingerbread boy became ET. We discovered marshmallow crème fudge, and added that to the repertoire. Then, on Christmas eve, we set a platter full out for Santa, and it was amazing what prodigious amounts he ate.
On the big night, we hung four socks on the mantle. We always used Vake’s big wool work socks, and Milly insisted that we use the nicer, newer ones, not the ones worn thin at the heels or darned over the hole in the toe.
On Christmas morning, we would find what seemed like a mountain of presents under the Christmas tree. The socks would be stuffed with an orange or Red Delicious apple, a handful of walnuts, some cookies (hmmm, these look familiar), a candy cane, and hard candies. The packages contained great toys! There was the toy microscope, the Gilbert chemistry set, an erector set, and Sandy’s Lincoln Logs. Sandy and I got plastic pop beads when they were all the rage. When I was high school aged, I once had to open my main gift on Christmas eve. The Stoner family had come over from Eugene, and Dad wanted to show John my gift, a Birmingham Small Arms, Martini Action, 11# target rifle that I went on to use in many competitions—and won ‘em, too!
By Christmas afternoon, while Milly fixed dinner, the adults might have a Tom and Jerry, a classical 1950s-era cocktail that mixed a thick sugar and egg batter flavored with rum into a mug of hot water and a shot of bourbon, finished with a shake of nutmeg on top. The kids got theirs without the bourbon, but that was just right.
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