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| Jody and I smile in front of the silver Christmas tree. |
When I was a kid, putting up the Christmas tree and decorating it was
one of the major events of the Christmas season. In the ‘50s and early ‘60s,
dad went to one of the Christmas Tree lots in Rialto, California, and bought a
real one. Those were splendid trees with their evergreen smell that so expertly
summoned the Christmas spirit. But they dried and presented a fire hazard, so
dad bought one of those less-than-stellar silver trees. They were just a step
above Charlie Brown’s little tree. Like Charlie Brown’s tree, that silver tree
didn’t look too bad once decorated. A slowly turning color wheel took the place
of the cords of lights that had been strung around the real Christmas trees in
earlier years.
I’ve a photograph of my sister Jody and I standing in front of that
straggly silver tree. She’s showing off a new doll while I hold a ball glove. Like many photos from the early ‘60s, time hasn’t been kind to
it. It’s smudged, damaged when removed from a photo album. I cropped it to remove the damage.
In later years, when we lived on Mount Eaton Road just outside
Wadsworth, Ohio, and then down south on the Muskingum River in Beverly we
decorated a green artificial tree that was a bit more complicated to erect than
that silver tree we owned in California. It was prettier, but the silver tree
still holds a special place in my heart.
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| Grandpa Frog and Grandma Mid at Uncle Denny's house. |
Christmas Eve and Christmas Day were hectic at our houses in Wadsworth
and Beverly. On Christmas Eve we’d celebrate Christmas at the house of my
cousins, Candy and Pat Kelly. It was quite an affair. Many branches of the
family came to the celebration including my dad’s sister Emmy and her husband
and their kids, Billy, Kim, Ken and –born much later – Brian. The kids ate at
our own table while the parents ate at the "grownup" table. Candy and Pat’s dad
Jack would head to Akron after the meal to do his shopping, then come back and
wrap his gifts. We waited and waited and waited, and only after Jack returned
and wrapped his presents could our gifts be unwrapped beside the Kelly’s huge
"real" Christmas tree. Each December Jack chopped down a tree on the Kelly
property and hauled it to the house. The Kelly’s recreation room had a high
ceiling, perfect for that extra-tall tree erected in front of the large
picture-glass window that over looked the driveway.
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| Bruce Snyder on Grandma Mid's lap; Denny with Taffy. |
One Christmas Eve we left the Kelly house after midnight – actually,
Christmas morning, right? – and discovered several inches of newly fallen snow.
The overcast had cleared and a fall moon casts its brilliance down on the white
blanket that covered the yard. Even now, decades later, I can say that night
was the brightest I’ve ever seen. It was mystical ... I expected to see fairies
fluttering above the snow or maybe a unicorn to emerge from the woods.
After celebrating our own Christmas on Christmas morning – and eating
the traditional fruitcake supplied by dad’s mom, our Grandmother Nan, we’d pack
presents in the car for Grandpa Frog and Grandma Mid, Uncle Denny and Aunt Dee
and their kids, Kim and Kevin, and head to the Fourth Street house in Rittman.
In earlier times, when Denny was young and still living at home,
Grandpa Frog bought a real tree for the living room. My dad, who will be 87 in
April, recently shared some memories of Christmas in Rittman. He said that
Grandma Mid would study the tree and whenever she saw a "thin" area she’d have
grandpa hammer in an additional limb. That’s right ... grandpa would not only
bring the Christmas Tree, he’d also come back to the house with extra limbs.
He’d saw them to fit the trunk and then affix them to the tree with nails. He
must have been grateful when they purchased an artificial tree, one that had
not only limbs that needed to be attached to the trunk, but branches and twigs
that had to be attached to the limbs.
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| "Joyful" partying at Christmastime 1981. |
In the 1940s and 1950s Denny’s train set ran around the tree. That’s
the way Christmas should be ... a Lionel engine and railcars wheeling around a
real tree.
Nowadays my sister
Jody and her husband put up a couple of artificial trees, one in the living
room and one in the back family room. I don’t know if any of her three
daughters, all married, plan to return to Beverly to celebrate Christmas. Two –
Quinn and Vanessa – live in Charlotte, North Carolina, while the third, Nicci,
lives up in Central Michigan. Jody is a grandmother now ... Quinn and her husband
Lance have a toddler, Griffin, 15 months old, who will be experiencing his
first Christmas where he can actually open presents. In the not-so-distant
future, Griffin will be tucking away memories of Christmas trees and celebrations
that perhaps he’ll write about in the 2070s.
