Christmas, the Eve, the Day

For some of us in our eighth decade, everything seems to be less about the present than about the past, but I think that for virtually all adults who do not have young children in their immediate environment, Christmas Eve is pretty much all nostalgia, all the time.  And the older one gets, the farther back that nostalgia goes.  If I just knew something about my mother’s or my grandmother’s childhood Christmases, I’d probably be nostalgic for them.
Comparing Christmas Eve in the 1930’s and ‘40’s with Christmas in the first decade of the 21st Century presents such an enormous gap that I can scarcely make my way across it.  I was in Idaho, then.  It was always cold at Christmas, bitterly cold, and snow was abundantly available usually.   By Christmas, the town government people would have flooded a vacant lot with water and there we could take our new skates to try out on Christmas Day itself.  I don’t know that anybody floods anything anywhere for skating rinks anymore.  We’ve found other ways, for pretty much everything, I guess.

Before, during, and immediately after the war, Christmas was a tree with decorations, and singing on Christmas Eve plus the opening of one carefully chosen gift from those under the tree, and then on the following morning, the rest of the presents.  It seemed like a lot of presents, but there were seven of us by 1945, and since everyone bought at least one gift for everyone else, plus the grandparents’ gifts, the abundance was largely sheer volume. The childrens’ presents always included new pajamas/nightgowns, slippers, a game, a book, maybe new mittens, and one big phenomenon: a train set, ice skates, a bicycle, although those big gifts were more a post-war phenomenon. 

In early December each year, my parents would give us each a little money, $3 or $4, as I recall, and with this we were expected to produce about ten presents: one for each of the other 8 family members, and a couple for friends.  We made some things.  I remember embroidering baby bibs for my youngest sister one winter, knitting scarves or mittens when we were ten or so.  We spent many hours in the five and dime stores (Woolworth, Kress, Newberry’s) imagining buying a little bottle of perfume for our mother (Evening in Paris, in a blue bottle), some candy for our father, little salt and pepper shaker sets for my grandmother who was a collector of such things, barrettes or hair ribbons for another sister, a deck of cards for my older brother, a simple toy for the baby (I recall painting empty wooden thread spools with red fingernail polish and then stringing them together one year), and I don’t know what for the friends.  Coloring books? Stickers?  Jacks or marbles?  Possibly.

During the war, there just wasn’t that much stuff around for presents.  I remember one year, my grandparents gave me a can of mushrooms, while my older brother received a package of cinnamon rolls.  I remember my next younger sister receiving several pieces of Fleer’s DoubleBubble gum, gum whose taste I can recall vibrantly still.  Our stockings had fifteen or twenty cents at the bottom, a tangerine, a few pecans and walnuts in their shells, a package or two of life-savers, a small package of maple sugar candy, some crayons or colored pencils, maybe a little notebook.  And we were plenty excited about such wonderful things because, in general, we didn’t have very many things.

Today’s children and grandchildren have so much of everything that they already have everything long before Christmas is even an emerging holiday.  And they’re surely not spending their days trying to imagine what they might give to someone else.  To my surprise, it turns out that I share that experience with this current generation of children: now, I too have or have had just about everything I could ever want; such an abundance of things, experiences, and relationships that I cannot imagine ever needing more, although I definitely continue to need those I still have.  And all I have to give is the work of my hand.

Merry Christmas to all those I know and love, to all those who read this, many of whom I do not know, to all those of good will: May the abundance of life ever reside in your heart.