GHOSTS OF CHRISTMAS PAST, PART 2

The Sunday School Christmas program consisted of classes singing appropriate Christmas songs and endless line of children standing before a microphone reciting memorized “pieces.” By late November my Dad would be inquiring if I had gotten my piece yet so he could make sure I had it memorized. There was no way for a shy person like me to escape this agony of public performance; Dad’s brother was the Sunday School superintendent. It was going to happen no matter what. Kid after kid came up to recite. Usually the girls got through with out a fault, but the boys had serious problems, mostly because none of them bothered to look at their pieces until Saturday night before the Sunday performance.

There were a variety of recitation techniques. Some ran through the piece so fast that no one could understand what they had said. This usually brought a smile or a giggle from the other kids, but that was quickly squelched by a frosty glare from my aunt Martha, who supervised the programs. Some started, got half way through, stopped, and started over a few time before finally reaching the end. Others got part-way through and stopped dead until given the next word by my aunt. And then there were the hapless few who got through the first line and stopped, were given a clue, said a few words and stopped again, and finally reached the point where they had to be told each word before they could utter it. You could always spot that kid’s parents by the agonized look on their face. With the rehearsals by my Dad I usually managed fairly well, but I was always intrigued by the peculiar sound of my voice over the p. a. system. Sometimes I became so enamored of my own voice that I lost track of what I was supposed to be saying. I couldn’t tell my Dad that, so when I asked what happened, I just used the all purpose. “I dunno. I guess I forgot.” “You’ve got the memory of an elephant,” Dad would say, “a dead one.”

The program always ended in the passing out of little boxes of hard candy. These were small cardboard boxes that my aunt and uncle and cousins had to fill before the performance. Uncle Herb turned his house into a production line so that the boxes could be filled in an efficient manner as befits a job done by a family of German-Americans. All the efficiency in the world, however, couldn’t overcome a design flaw in the boxes. They had little handles made of cord. Inevitably, a cord pulled out of somebody’s box sending several dozen pieces of hard candy rattling to the floor and rolling under the pews while the Pastor said the closing prayer. Some religions ring bells, some shake tambourines. We rolled candy on the floor.

Now, the real Christmas festivities were done in the home. The most important preparatory rites had to do with the Christmas Tree. An evening was designated as tree buying night. By a great mystery still not fully understood by meteorological science, our family always picked the coldest day in December to do our tree shopping. We bundled up in an assortment of sweaters, coats, hats, mufflers, and gloves: the latter often presented me with a problem since I frequently managed to lose one glove by this time–a fact I could keep hidden in most circumstances by keeping my hands in my pockets, but which would become obvious in the tree picking process which required two hands. Suitably dressed, we headed out in the car to the Wiebolts parking lot where most people in the neighborhood purchased Christmas Trees

In my mind the rule of bigger is better applied to trees as well as gifts, but I soon discovered there was an unanticipated restriction on tree size. The problem wasn’t the height of the room. Our living room had ten-foot ceilings. No, the restriction had to do with the depth of the pocket-book. Trees cost by the foot. There was a splash of paint on the bottom of the trunk that indicated both the height and the price. Fortunately we didn’t have to buy one of the white-marked table top trees. We got a full sized tree, but always one in the blue-marked, moderate-sized price range and never the red-marked, giant-sized range.

When the ideal tree was found, it was tied up with string and lashed to the top of the car. It was at this point that my Dad would discover I was only using one hand to help secure the tree. “Use both hands,” he’d shout. Reluctantly I’d take my ungloved hand from my pocket. “Where’s your other glove” he’d ask? “I dunno,” I’d reply. “I guess I forgot it in school.” “You’d forget your head if it weren’t screwed on.”

Unlike some families that would have immediately installed the tree in the living room, we exiled the tree to the basement under the back porch. It was a kind of cold storage to keep the tree fresh until the appropriate Saturday arrived for decorating. My sister Karen took a more personal approach to Christmas trees than I did. She always named the tree Timothy. Not me. I knew that a tree would eventually wind up in the trash. It was best not to get emotionally involved.

At last decorating day arrived. It began with moving enough furniture out of the living room so that the tree would fit. With much sawing and slashing and trimming, Dad got the tree fixed in the large, green tree stand. Opinions were offered about which side was the best and should be placed facing the room and whether or not the tree was really straight. Now the boxes of ornaments and lights were brought up from the basement. First, the lights were put on. This was principally Dad’s job as it required some technical knowledge to check the various strings of lights. Inevitably some lights had burned out and needed to be replaced. How this occurred was another Christmas mystery. Every string had been checked before being packed away the preceding January, and all were determined to be in working order. In the old days when Christmas lights were strung in series circuits, the light checking could take a half hour since one burned-out bulb caused the entire string to go out. Each bulb had to be removed and tested until the guilty culprit found. The new parallel strings seemed miraculous.

While the electrical work was being completed, Mom unpacked the ornaments and laid them out on the sofa. First, the chains were unwrapped. These were strings of glass beads, actually more like tiny ornaments. These were draped carefully on the branches. Then the rest of the ornaments were unpacked. It was a fascinating assortment. A star with a white light in it topped the tree. Five pink plastic cherubs were placed by Mom on the ends of the highest branches. Then there were colored glass balls, little horns that really worked, wonderful ornaments made of beads wired together in geometric patterns. I have never seen anything like them since. There were plastic lanterns with little turbines in them which spun furiously if they were hung over a light bulb. And there were the birds, wonderful birds with feathery tales. Some of these birds had belonged to my grandparents. They had short springs for legs, and occasionally these springs came loose from the stand that clipped them to the tree. The old ones had the legs reconnected with some mysterious substance that my sister still claims is chewing gum (black-jack gum chewed by Grandma especially for the occasion). There were also a few Styrofoam balls with pipe-cleaner hangers that we decorated ourselves. I noticed as the years went on that the ornament I had decorated tended to get hung in the back of the tree.

Finally the tinsel was put on. Some families threw tinsel at the tree. I always wanted to do this ever since I had seen Two-Ton Baker, a local TV entertainer, decorate a tree sitting in a chair and tossing tinsel on the tree. Mom would not allow such a thing. She didn’t care what any disreputable TV personality did. Tinsel had to be hung piece by piece to achieve the right effect. In the good old days, tinsel was made out of shiny, lead-based foil. It was great stuff for rolling into hard little balls and throwing at people. Eventually, the fire department grinches struck again and outlawed metal tinsel because it caused shorts in electrical devices. Only plastic tinsel was allowed to be sold. For several years we carefully removed as much of the tinsel as we could from the tree once Christmas was over and saved it for next year. But this early form of recycling had a diminishing return, and one year we, too, had to buy the new plastic tinsel. Disgusting stuff, but what could you do?

When everything was done, Grandma and Grandpa Kofink joined us. Everybody got a glass of eggnog, the living room lights were turned off, and we admired the handiwork of the gleaming tree. We had to enjoy it then because the lights would only be turned on for brief periods of time until Christmas Day for fear that they would dry out the tree. Grandma or Grandpa would inevitably tell the story of the miraculous tree they had back in the 30s that stayed alive until February, its trunk imbedded in a bucket of sand. Grandma and Grandpa usually had their own table-top tree that they decorated with absolutely ancient ornaments. After Grandpa died, the ritual changed. Grandma no longer decorated a tree of her own. Instead, she was given a small plastic tree that was permanently decorated and kept in a plastic bag between Christmases. So she joined the rest of us in decorating our tree. I have concluded it is a sign that you are over the hill when you are no longer allowed to decorate your own Christmas Tree.

In the days of waiting, may the Lord God bless you on your way and greet you on your arrival.
Wayne