A Very Different Christmas

It will be very quiet in apartment 204, unlike any we have ever experienced. This column is being drafted several days prior to Christmas day. COVID-19 is just one contact away, and the isolation is profound. Wendy and I will phone the children, hold each other and be thankful for another year. We will see few neighbors but will call to any we might see, “Merry Christmas.” But there will be no children, few gifts to unwrap, no family deaths to mourn. Again this year the gifts I give in honor of the family will be a $10,000 contribution to my favorite—I cannot call it a charity—life-giving organization.

But despite the limitations, the day will be filled with memories and visions. Among Christmases still permeating my consciousness will be those in the late 1930s when I was a grade school child. I can still see my father descending the stairs Christmas morning before dawn to turn on the Christmas tree lights, not knowing (or did he? ) that my little brother Peter and I had crept down those stairs an hour earlier to observe the pile of gifts under the tree. That tree was always richly decorated with traditional-mostly homemade -ornaments. The actual decorating did not take place until Peter and I were safely in bed. We were not to see the finished product until we were roused from a deep sleep—as if we really were still sound asleep.

My father and I had bought the tree from the neighborhood tree lot, but not until late Christmas Eve when the leftover trees were much cheaper even if almost bare on one side (the side we would turn to the wall). We never paid more than a dollar, and if we waited for the tree lot to close, they were even cheaper than that. We may have been poor, but didn’t know it, and we never never complained about it or even discussed it. We were warm, well fed and surrounded with a love no money could buy. What more could a child want? There was no tv to show us what we didn’t have.

That tree would remain in place for weeks, until at night we could hear the needles falling on the newspaper used as a decorative base. When the tree had finished its assignment, it was carried to a nearby field and, with a couple of hundred others, ignited in a great community bonfire.

Later on Christmas Day Nana and PopPop would arrive with wooden wonders PopPop had made—a three inch race car, a tiny chair, a toy kitchen. Christmas dinner would be turkey. Easter would arrive in a few months and the dinner would be ham. (Don’t ask me why. Tradition doesn’t need a reason.)


The gifts under the tree, or hanging from the fireplace mantel in mother’s old stockings, tended to be apples and oranges. There were also warm clothes and at least one game, or a little device for stringing beads to make Indian bracelets, or maybe even a child’s chemistry set.

I remember the years when there was a serious snowfall, and after the gifts had been opened, hours would be spent building a snowman, complete with a carrot for a nose and lumps of coal for eyes. When we had finished that creation, we would lie on our backs waving our arms resulting in the creation of angels. Then there would be hot chocolate.

During the war (WWII), we would sit quietly in a much subdued darkened house and remember cousin Fred, who was a prisoner of the Germans somewhere in France. Mother would be hard at work creating braille books for blind veterans, and Dad, as the area’s air raid warden, would have checked neighbor houses the to be certain no light was escaping the curtained or boarded windows.

As deeply religious as was my family, we never went to church Christmas Day or Christmas Eve. In fact, there were no services at our church. I was told only Catholics did that.
Each of us will have our own stories. Some will be fountains of joy and others will be wet with tears. What are yours? Why not tell them to each other? But for now this Christmas will embody its own quiet dignity.