Weave the Web

 It had also been a wedding present. (from  a mysterious great uncle of my father’s, who was long dead by the time I was born and who was looked on darkly by the Hickman family as someone who had married my father’s Aunt Charlotte  “for her money”, which was curious because its not clear to this date whether she never had any).   From that same shelf, in a small flat blue box and also appearing only at Christmas time, came a collection of sugar cubes each of which had an individual tiny design of frosted flowers  appliquéd to the top.   The cubes were for coffee or tea.   

 

People adjourned to the living room with their plates of food and cups of tea or coffee. Because this was in the days before TV trays and coffee tables, they proceeded to  balance everything carefully on their knees while proceeding to eat, drink and, of course, talk.

 

At no time during the day – either at dinner or supper – was wine or any other alcoholic beverage served.  Booze was absent in our house, as in most houses in Sioux City.  Liquor, like cigarettes, was generally frowned upon.  For my parents, unlike for many, the issue was not a religious one.  They simply thought drinking (and smoking) was stupid.  Liquor was actually not available in the general stores, only in special state liquor stores which, like Christian Science reading rooms of those times, had glass windows frosted to a height that concealed who was inside buying booze.  In that wonderful respect for the individual that permeated the Midwest at mid century, anyone who had a less-than-admirable weakness for spirits was thus shielded from being exposed.   No scarlet letters in this community, which usually felt straying from grace was a private matter.

 

I don’t recall any Christmases that were especially different over the years one from another, although I do recall one which was amusing in retrospect but at the time got my parents so upset that they hardly talked to each other all day.

 

It started with a decision by my father, who was a renaissance handyman par excellence, to suddenly -- and for no apparent reason  -- pick Christmas morning as the time to install a new toilet.  He told my mother it would only take a half hour, and he started right after breakfast.  I was old enough to drive and had gone across town to collect the senior ladies, and he said in response to my Mother’s objections that the job would be done and the rest of Christmas morning ready to go when I returned.  Wrong:  the gremlins, who, then as now, always are circling for an opportunity to create havoc, attacked and nothing went right.  Something broke or something was missing – in either case no stores were open.  With no toilet in operation (this in the days before powder rooms or multiple bathrooms) and three older ladies with weak kidneys on the premises, this quickly deteriorated from a humorous situation to a serious problem.  My mother was upset.  Very upset.  Finally, she called Lillian, the lady next door, to ask if we could use their bathroom for the day.  They, of course, also had only one bathroom, which was at the top of a tortuous set of steps and, as it turned out, was unheated.  They also had a houseful of guests.  All day long, our old ladies trooped out in the cold and thru the snow to the steep steps and cold garret of the neighbors.  They always went in pairs, whether they were afraid to solo or were just following the twining ritual that women used to do in those days when going to the bathroom, I’ll never know.  At one point, my Grandmother Hickman and Aunt Minnie joked about having to wait in line next door and said they should probably just use an empty coffee can from our kitchen.  I was intrigued by the bodily contortions this might entail – but also shocked.  No one in my family ever talked out loud about bodily functions. Especially not prim, white-haired old ladies!

 

Christmas decorations around the house were limited to two unlighted wreaths in the front windows and, usually, a 4 to 5 foot Christmas tree.  We had a rag tag set of tree decorations, collected by my parents over the years and including some  I suspect were inherited from their own parents when they gave up hosting Christmases (which was long before I was born).  Among these decorations was an annoying string of lights that worked in series:  if one light went out, the whole string blinked off.  When that happened, one had to tediously go light by light thru the string, testing each bulb to find the guilty one.  This was no easy task if the tree was already decorated and “up.”  Although we also had more modern strings of lights that worked in parallel (one bulb goes out, the rest still light), my parents never considered tossing the series string.   This was a bygone era when people didn’t throw out things that got outmoded or outdated but still worked, just like they didn’t throw out either socks with holes that could be darned or shirts whose worn collars could be “turned” and in both cases returned to active duty ready for more use

 

Ironically, although we kept the ancient string of annoying series lights forever, we were always on the cutting edge of new lighting fads.  If some kind of new light came along, we got it.  That included round flourescent bulbs one year (they had an eerie occasional flicker).  My favorite was bubble lights, although they required ongoing attention to make sure they stayed vertical so the bubbles would put on their show. Getting a Christmas tree was one of the few things my father and I did together on a regular basis.  On a Saturday about two weeks before Christmas each year, he would take me on his way to work (like a lot of other people in those days, he worked half-days on Saturday) to a tree lot, and we’d do the usual prowling for just the right one.  I was always allowed to make the final choice.  I have no recollection of the prices then, although they were much less than now of course.   No one had artificial trees:  they didn’t exist.

 

 

Only once in all the years of growing up did we ever get a

tree tall enough to stand on the floor.  All other times, the

trees were short enough to stand on one of my mother’s

prized mahogany end tables which normally flanked each

end of the living room couch but which we moved around

each Christmas to give what we then thought was the best

view of the decorations.  Sometimes the tree was in the front

windows, sometimes by the piano.  The year we got a tall tree,

it was in a corner.  The first time I didn’t get the tree was my

first year in college, when I arrived home from the train station

to find one up already and fully decorated.  Unfortunately, while

my parents had gone to the station to get me, our dog Nipper had

gotten into the candy under the branches and thrown up magnificently

in the living room all over the new green and white shag rug .

 

Putting up the tree was fun.  Sometimes my mother would help,

but often I did it by myself.  She was keen on lots of tinsel and

was very emphatic about how it was applied:  each strand was

hung separately to fall straight down giving the finished tree kind

of a chic weeping willow appearance.  Of course, in those days, just

like socks that were recycled by darning, tinsel was recycled in our house by carefully removing it – also strand by stand – and arranging it carefully for storage so individual strands could be easily removed the next year for re-hanging.  The tree looked like a chicken carcass picked clean when all the decorations and tinsel were removed just before New Year’s Day.  De-tinseling the tree was the biggest chore, and since that lengthy labor was the result of my mother’s tinsel fetish, I often drafted her to be the chief de-tinseler.  She loved doing it.

 

Memories of those Christmas days of long ago color how I still view Christmas these many decades later.  Except for my brothers and cousins who are still around, the smells, the lights, the parents, aunts, uncles and grandmothers of my childhood Christmases are gone.    But, when I tap into my memories properly, everybody and everything comes back.   I can hear, for example, my middle-aged mother and her middle-aged sisters in their holiday finery (dresses not slacks, since “ladies” didn’t wear slacks in those days) getting the girlish giggles in the kitchen late at night as they scrubbed pans and wiped dishes  after Christmas day supper. 

 

And I still relish decorating a Christmas tree,

fussing with the lights,unwrapping the old

ornaments (the worn old goose handed down

from my great grandparents is the last

ornament to be hung) and wistfully remembering

the shining strands of tinsel no longer

sold in stores for environmental reasons.        

 

The magic of Christmases today rests solidly

on memories of Christmases past.