Voices Singing “Let’s Be Jolly”

I’m just not a party person; I’m like my mother and grandmother in that. That’s why I don’t find many photos of parties in my files.

When we were young children, I think our parents must have gone to some parties at the NCO Club, as least I do remember an occasional babysitter. When my father was a First Sergeant on our first tour in Germany, he would sometimes invite some of the men in his unit to our home, but I think those were more like family dinners than parties.

There must have been several holiday parties at school during my elementary years, but the only one I remember was in my fifth-grade year, when it happened that my teacher was Jewish – although that has nothing to do with the story. This was during the era familiar to many baby-boomers, when overcrowded schools had some children going to school in the morning and others in the afternoon. That happened for me in sixth grade, but in fifth grade I got lucky and was assigned to an all-day class made up of both fifth- and sixth-graders.

This story does not reflect well on my ten-year-old self, but it taught me several lessons. I’ll just tell the story and let you find the lessons in it yourself.

One of the features of our holiday party was that we drew names for a Secret Santa gift exchange. Now there was one girl in our class who, while she wasn’t bullied in school, was not well-liked. Brenda was not an unpleasant person, rather self-effacing, but she had greasy hair, unfashionable clothes, and a bad complexion – and sadly, these things meant that no one wanted to be her friend. So I wasn’t pleased when I drew her name in the gift exchange. Rather mean-spiritedly, I chose a bottle of iridescent lavender nail polish, which I thought was the ugliest thing I’d ever seen. (It was like this, but not as high-quality.)

Brenda loved it. She was really pleased with her gift and wore it frequently for the rest of the school year. I don’t remember her being in school after that year, and I suspect now that her family was poor and somewhat transient.

And what did I get? There was a small group of sixth-grade boys (they probably went on to play football) who were the Alpha Males of the classroom, and one of them drew my name, as I could tell from their covert glances as I opened my gift. Unwrapping several layers of aluminum foil, I came at last to a handful of shelled peanuts. And what’s more – some of the peanuts were real, but some were rubber.

I’ll continue the discussion of Christmas parties in the December 9th “Grab Bag” post.

They Know That Santa’s on His Way

(Note: This is the memory slated to post on December 6, a day without Internet for me. I hope to be caught up by tomorrow.)

It is Christmas Eve, 1952, early in the evening, for my brother, not quite 2, and I, 4 1/2, are still up. The new twins are sleeping, and some aunts and uncles are visiting with my mother. Daddy is in Japan, and will soon be going to war in Korea, but my brother and I don’t understand this. We are excited about Christmas. Suddenly there is a knocking on the window and a face appears out of the darkness – a face with a big white beard and crowned with a red hat with fur trim. We know who that must be. Yet one of us is frightened and hides behind the big armchair, while the other laughs excitedly at this visit from Santa. But which was the frightened one and which the brave? It seems to me I used to know, but now I can’t remember. Perhaps the fact that I can’t recall whether Santa came into the house suggests that I was the scaredy-cat. This is my first memory of Santa Claus.

I don’t recall much about “commercial” Santas in my childhood, other than the advertisements for Coca-Cola and other things that appeared in the Saturday Evening Post or other magazines we took. I can’t recall ever visiting a department store Santa, although when we lived on military posts there may have been Santas at the NCO Club parties – more about one of those in the next post. Santa, to us, was a spirit or “ghost.”

As such, Santa (and we) adhered to some very specific rules. On Christmas Eve we hung our stockings (Daddy’s big olive-drab Army socks) on the backs of chairs. I don’t recall ever having a fireplace or worrying about the lack of one. Then we went to bed earlier than usual, after leaving a snack for Santa. No cookies and milk for our Santa – he liked pie and coffee, we knew.

We could get up as early as we wanted on Christmas morning – 4:30, 4:00, maybe even 3:30! (To this day I can’t sleep late on Christmas morning and usually wind up waking everyone else up.) We would wake our parents, and then came the tantalizing minutes while they went to the living room and the kitchen and put on a pot of coffee. Thus fortified, they called us in to attack the stockings. Santa does not wrap presents; he puts them in the stockings, or underneath if they do not fit. Santa always left us a thank-you note for the pie and coffee. It was written in a special “ghostly” handwriting – very shaky like the handwriting of a very old person. By the time we were done exclaiming over our gifts from Santa, and had reached the tangerine or orange in the toe, our parents were ready to face the day (I suspect Mama had already been out in the kitchen getting the huge turkey into the oven). Then my father would begin to hand out the tree presents, one at a time, with everyone watching each other unwrap the gifts from our parents and others, and those we gave.

I don’t know a lot about Santa in my mother’s childhood home (and still less of my father’s), but I do remember her saying that they always heard reindeer hooves on the roof and could see the prints in the snow on Christmas morning. Was it just Grampie throwing snowballs? If so, he missed out on a baseball career, because it would take a powerful arm to throw snowballs onto that roof. Here’s a picture of their house, just before it was torn down to make room for I95. The rooms had tall Victorian ceilings and the children nearly all slept on the second floor.

Raising our own children in the city, Onkel Hankie Pants and I did take them to see Santa – for many years, in conjunction with the Christmas show of animated figures at Dayton’s downtown store. Polaroid photographs were sold of the occasion; the children’s reactions to their Santa visits varied, as you can see below.

One year when Sisterfilms was small, we discovered the Santa at Bachman’s, the giant florist/nursery/gift shop whose lilac packaging is a familiar sight in the Twin Cities. I would readily believe that this was the Real Santa. And there was no hard sell – bring your own camera, take your own picture.

Santa’s duties are shared in our home now, and even the grownups and the dog get stockings. In some way, even when I’m staggering around early in the morning filling stockings, I still believe in the Santa Claus spirit my parents taught me about.

Auntie Knickers’ Advent Storytime: Day 8

I’m not the world’s biggest fan of major department stores. But I think we lost something important when so many American cities’ iconic local department stores were subsumed into Macy’s. I think Macy’s (the original, Thanksgiving Day Parade, Miracle on 34th Street Macy’s in New York City) lost something too. It’s not special any more. But wait, isn’t this supposed to be storytime? Where’s this rant coming from? Well, back when the new Governor of Minnesota’s name was on the big store on Nicollet Mall, one of our yearly family rituals was to take in the Dayton’s 8th Floor Auditorium Holiday Show. We often did it on Christmas Eve morning, with some sort of treat afterwards – when SonShineIn was small, it was lunch at Kramarczuk’s in Northeast Minneapolis, later when more children and church responsibilities meant a more hectic day, simply hot chocolate and a special cookie sufficed. There is still a show at what is now Macy’s, but Sisterfilms tells me that it just isn’t the same. Twenty to thirty years ago, each year’s show was different, often based on a classic children’s book. Sometimes it tied in with the Christmas show being put on at the Children’s Theatre Company; some of the same designers worked on both.

One year the show was How the Grinch Stole Christmas, and that was the year I bought the book – the same edition shown in the picture, although our copy is pretty worn now. I can’t remember if I had read the book in childhood – I was beyond the picture book stage in 1957 when it was published – and I’m not sure I saw the first broadcast of the TV special as it took place December 18, 1966, and I may not have been home from college yet. (Television was a rare thing at my alma mater. I believe they brought some in to the dorm lounges on Election Night, and I only remember one person on my freshman floor who had a television in her room.) I’ve never seen the Jim Carrey movie, even though I picked up a copy at a yard sale, because that man’s face gives me the willies.

As he often did, Dr. Seuss has a message deftly hidden amidst all the fun and wordplay in this book. It’s one we can all use since the Recession Grinch has scaled down our material expectations of Christmas. (Every dark cloud has a silver lining!)

The well-known song from the TV special, “You’re a Mean One, Mr. Grinch,” has become a favorite of rock, pop, and jazz artists for inclusion on their Christmas albums. So I chose something a bit different – an instrumental played by All the King’s Tubas.

Now, if you are already completely Grinched-out and feeling Grinchy about the Grinch, perhaps you’d like to join Jim and Della once again in O. Henry’s Gifts of the Magi. You can go here to read more of the history of the story. This story has been dramatized and adapted numerous times, but to my knowledge no one put it to music till the Squirrel Nut Zippers.

Individual Files for Mac Users

Intro Dec 8 2010 Surprise How the Grinch Stole Christmas

Intro Dec 8 2007 Surprise Gifts of the Magi

Self-Extracting Zip Files for the Rest of Us

8 December 2010 8 December 2007

Auntie Knickers’ Advent Storytime: Days 6 and 7

I had not intended to fall behind so early in the month, but a defunct surge suppressor left me Internet-less all day yesterday. So tonight there are stories for both the 6th and 7th.

Baboushka and the Three Kings, a retelling of a Russian folk tale by Ruth Robbins, won the Caldecott Medal in 1961 for its illustrations by Nicolas Sidjakov. This ensured that it would remain in print and on library shelves, so it’s not hard to find and you really should look at the pictures. The story is suspiciously similar to the Italian legend of La Befana (which was retold and illustrated by Tomie de Paola years later). Archetype? Cultural migration? Who knows. It’s a lovely story.

For music to go with it, Sergei Prokofiev’s Troika, from the Lt. Kije Suite, gives a musical picture of a sleigh or carriage pulled by three horses. There are many performances available; I chose one by the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra.

Then, the St. Petersburg Chamber Choir sings Noch’ tikha, noch’ svyata (Ноч Тиха, Ноч Свята) – Silent Night in Russian.

For tonight, a story about a time when Santa didn’t want to climb into that old sleigh again: The Year without a Santa Claus by Phyllis McGinley. This has nothing to do with the television special, as far as I know. Phylis McGinley was a very popular writer of light verse in the 1950s. Her poems dealt mostly with the trials of the suburban housewife, always with a humorous touch, and were published widely in mass-market magazines (which actually published poetry and short stories back then.) I found a song by country singer Marty Stuart that seemed to go well with the story: Even Santa Gets the Blues.

For the alternative story on December 6, here’s one recorded in 2007, which I recall reading more than once at church on Christmas Eve. Mr. Edwards Meets Santa Claus is a chapter from Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie; here is the cover from the original edition, and then a photo of the set of paperbacks I bought a few years before our first child came along.

Because of the television series, many people think that the Little House on the Prairie was in South Dakota, but in fact it was in Kansas (as this chapter shows, mentioning towns there). I actually have a friend who comes from that part of Kansas and she has confirmed that the winters are as described. At the time I recorded this story, the Pa's Fiddle Project either had not begun or was in the planning stages, and I couldn’t find a solo fiddle playing a Christmas carol. An Americana Christmas, with Vassar Clements, Norman and Nancy Blake, and others, was the closest I could come with their lovely performance of Cradle Hymn (Away in a Manger) to the tune Afton Water.

Once during the 24 days of stories, I give myself a break by using a recording of a piece read by the author. In 2008 it was Truman Capote’s A Christmas Memory. For me, hearing Capote’s voice helps me get into the world he and his cousin inhabited. Since the story is about that much-maligned confection, fruitcake, I chose Seamus Kennedy’s singing of the humorous ditty, Miss Fogarty’s Christmas Cake, which is followed by an instrumental piece called The Cook in the Kitchen. His album Goodwill to Men is a wonderful blending of humor, raucous celebration, and quiet spirituality which I highly recommend.

Individual File Links for Mac Users

Intro Dec 6 2010 Surprise 1 Surprise 2 Baboushka and the Three Kings

Intro Dec 7 2010 Surprise The Year without a Santa Claus

Intro Dec 6 2007 Surprise Mr. Edwards Meets Santa Claus

Intro Dec 7 2008 Surprise A Christmas Memory

Self-Extracting Zip Files for the Rest of Us

December 6 2010 December 7 2010 December 6 2007

December 7 2008

And if you are looking for the Advent Calendar of Christmas Memories, I'll be posting three days at once tomorrow!

Auntie Knickers’ Advent Storytime: Day 5

Tonight there’s something a little different – it’s a memoir, or part of one. Lillian Smith, the author of such classics of civil rights literature as Strange Fruit and Killers of the Dream, wrote this memoir of her childhood Christmases that goes a long way to explain how this Southern white woman became a crusader for the civil rights of all people.

A good song to go with it is Almost Day, the Seeger family’s version of Leadbelly’s song On a Christmas Day.

The song is associated with Leadbelly (Huddie Ledbetter) and some say he wrote it. Ledbetter may or may not have worked on a chain gang like the Christmas guests in our story, but he definitely served time in Southern prisons. Afterwards, he made part of his living entertaining at children’s parties until he was discovered by folklorists John and Alan Lomax.

If you’d like something a little more antique, try this story that I recorded in 2006, the chapter “The Festival of St. Nicholas” from Mary Mapes Dodge’s Hans Brinker, or The Silver Skates. At the time, the only Dutch carol I could find was King Jesus Hath a Garden, sung by the Clare College Choir. Here’s another version by the Wells Cathedral Choir, in an arrangement by John Rutter.

Individual Files for Mac Users:

Introduction Dec 5 2010 Surprise Memory of a Large Christmas

Introduction Dec 5 2006 Surprise The Festival of St. Nicholas

Self-Extracting Zip Files for the Rest of Us

December 5 2010 December 5 2006

Merry Christmas Power Company

(The post title is from Neal and Leandra’s song, Boswell’s Lights, which appears on their album Angels and Fools. Highly recommended.)

Putting up outdoor Christmas decorations was not something we did much of in my childhood. Most of the time we were living in rented or military housing, and that may have had something to do with it. When we lived in Connecticut, my parents admired the colonial houses with one simple candle in each window – as do I. Here’s a picture of one from our neighborhood:

Unfortunately, although I would like to do this, I suspect our dog Rusty would make short work of them as soon as he saw a squirrel outside.

We did enjoy an occasional eveing drive to see decorations others had put up, and this continued once Onkel Hankie Pants and I formed our own family. For the many years we celebrated Christmas Eve at my in-laws’ home, the short drive home with sleepy children still awake enough to exclaim at the lighted houses on dark streets were a magical part of Christmas.

One year, after a few months of empty-nesting as our son was in his own apartment and both girls were in college on the East Coast, we got one of those inflatable snowmen and installed it on the front lawn with a sign reading “Welcome Home Sister Aimee and Little Nell.” (The “Sister Aimee” was a nod to Cordeliaknits’ newly-discovered, and now fulfilled, call to the ministry). They were both suitably embarrassed!

In our “new” house in Maine, we have sometimes decorated the three concrete lions in front with greenery or Santa hats. And since our house was built in 1951, it has a picture window through which our lighted tree can be seen all the way down the block.

Auntie Knickers’ Advent Storytime: Day 4

Sorry to be a little late tonight; I had a party to attend! Tonight we conclude Barbara Robinson’s classic, The Best Christmas Pageant Ever.

I think this was a play poster.

One Christmas song that always has me tearing up a little is “Away in a Manger” as sung by the cherub choir. Joan Baez does a good job too.

For those who’d like something a bit different, I’m including a Zip file of the story from December 4, 2007: Deputy Sid’s Gift by Tim Gautreaux, a fine contemporary Southern writer. I always enjoy reading stories in a dialect not my own. My general plan of attack is merely to suggest the accent, rather than trying to mimic it perfectly (which I can’t do in any case). If you’re from Louisiana, let me know how well I did on this one. I’m only including the Zip file because the story was 4.06 MB too long to fit the file-hoster’s protocol.

For Mac Users:

Intro Surprise Chapter 6 Chapter 7

Self-Extracting Zip Files for the Rest of Us

December 4 2010 December 4 2007