When I was young enough to still anticipate Santa, yet old enough to remember, Mom and Dad put up our Christmas tree at the back of the house, at the end of the dining room, next to the back door, a heavy old door with nine window panes that frosted around the edges in winter; I would reach up and carve through the rime with a fingernail and wonder at the snowscape in the backyard, the limits of my world, a world even smaller in deepest winter because it was seen only from the inside.
That door faced the east; some mornings the frost was so thick you couldn't see out, but the low rising sun exploded each pane as though it were mere inches away, and the frost would melt, and the room would warm as nine sunbeams inched across the dining room floor. The sun said goodbye in the same fashion on the other side of the house, though the front door with six frosted window panes and six sunbeams retreating across the living room floor.[1]
Holiday decorating started on the outside and worked in - spotlights on the lawn and strings of lights along the eaves, a wreath on the door, electric candles in the windows, a holiday table cloth and an angel centerpiece.
Our tree ornaments were simple, the tinsel thin, the tree topper a red aluminum star that accepted the last light of the string to illuminate it; the lights were multicolored, incandescent, hot to the touch; around the trunk Dad wrapped a white bed sheet to look like snow.[2]
Christmas music played daily on the console radio as soon as local stations started to play it; this began after Thanksgiving in small doses; not until Christmas Eve day could you hear Christmas music all day, and then it was only one station, and then only for 24 hours, ending promptly at 6pm Christmas Day.
In our home, Santa arrived Christmas Eve after we'd all gone to bed (he visited some houses the day before so those families could open their presents on Christmas Eve; I always thought that was nice of him to accommodate their schedules). We put cookies and milk out for him and hurried to bed early, because he wouldn't come until we were asleep. NORAD would report seeing a strange red light over the North Pole and this report was broadcast on the radio; this was a real report from a government agency about Santa. (NORAD still does this to this day, http://www.noradsanta.org/➚.)
The Santa I remember smoked a pipe, had a long flowing white beard, ruddy chubby cheeks, a fur-trimmed red suit and tasseled cap. He was always jolly, could be stern (he had a naughty list, after all), but had a short memory.[3]
One present I remember in particular quite well: a blue vinyl Disney wallet with Mickey Mouse embossed on it and a snap change pocket inside; actually, I think Mickey was a puffy vinyl patch glued on. Brother Tom received one just like it, but it was red with Pluto.[4]
Another present I remember well, around that time, perhaps the same year: my Dad took us all to his company Christmas party, which (as Mom and Dad recall) was held at the Boston Store downtown. Santa was there, and he gave me and brother Tom each a gift. I don't remember what Tom got, but I got a gold plastic trumpet. It had no moving parts; it was just a single piece of molded plastic. I treasured it and took it to bed with me that night, knowing very soon Santa would leave even more presents under our tree.[5]
The earliest memories are the sweetest, the simplest, the most enduring; we cling to them without judgment, without even the capacity to judge; memories like these, and the capacity to create them again, is what we pass on to our children. Santa is a beautiful mechanism for transmitting innocence and magic from one generation to the next, entirely apart from whether he is real or not.
[1]
This was before we added the family room to the back of the house. You don't see doors like this in new homes. It was an old solid wood door with nine single pane windows occupying the top half, and there was a storm door on the outside that held a window in winter and a screen in summer. The reason the frost formed was because the house was losing heat. Our house was often cold in the very old days, but since then Mom and Dad have done what most families do to old homes over years - replaced the furnace, the windows, insulated; I'm sure they don't share the fond memories for icy windows and cold floors that I do.
Sometimes our strongest memories are the most most mundane: falling asleep to a TV test pattern; waiting all day to hear one song on the radio; waiting a year to see last year's big theatrical release on TV; dirty magazines in every grocery store; grownups smoking in every grocery store; real butter, real gravy, real meat, real sugar, real salt, strong coffee, black toast, eggs deviled and fried and poached and boiled and chopped and mixed with real mayonnaise made with real oil; Saturday cartoons on three channels until 11am; good-guy wrestlers like Chief Jay Strongbow and Ivan Putski; sports heroes like Johnny Bench, Pete Rose, Joe Morgan, Tony Perez, Dave Concepcion, George Foster, Ken Griffey, Cesar Geronimo, Sparky Anderson; writers like Michael Crichton and Alistair MacLean; movies like The Dirty Dozen and The Jungle Book (which starred Phil Harris voicing Baloo); music by Three Dog Night, Neil Young, America; TV shows like The Andy Griffith Show (which we called "Andy Barney") and My Three Sons and Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C. and Family Affair and so on and so on and so on, depending on where and when you lived and how late you could stay up and what your parents let you read.
You have to live it when your brain is young and soft in order to unreservedly love a memory; if you're old enough to question it, you're too old to look back without a subtly destructive judgment. If you're young enough, you regard the memories like a deep love, the object of which can do no wrong, because she is perfect, and perfectly beautiful, and ever will be.
Of course, the generation that preceded mine has similar memories that I do not have and can never fully appreciate - coal furnaces, ration cards, liberty cabbage, nickel matinee movies, Fibber McGee and Molly, sandlot baseball, Casablanca and It's a Wonderful Life, Superman and Captain America, Slo Pokes and Necco Wafers, Bing Crosby and Glenn Miller and Les Brown and The Andrews Sisters and so on and so on and so on, depending on where and when you lived and how late you could stay up and what your parents let you read.
This is our front door, it's the same door that's been there since I was a child. Outside that door, behind the homes across the street and up a slight incline, grow wild grape vines and many sorts of bushes and trees; the sun sets over those bushes and trees, into the back yards of those homes across the street. I played there often, and ate wild grapes and apples and pears from our neighbors' yards.
[2]
Dad has talked a lot about his own childhood Christmases. I will blog separately about that.
[3]
The Santa I knew looked a lot like the one illustrated by Coca-Cola. Not precisely, but nearly so. Different aspects of Santa have of course originated in different places, but they came together most fully in the last century in Coke ads.
http://www.thecoca-colacompany.com/heritage/cokelore_santa.html ➚
[4]
It looked a little like this, except with Mickey and Pluto, of course.
[5]
My Mom and Dad say that they think they brought those gifts and gave them to Santa to give to us, but I didn't know that until only recently.
