ELF's Brief Holiday History

Newcomb:

Images: a Christmas tree in the front room of the house, the room you had to step down to get into. A wooden steamboat, painted blue and white, that I could sit on and ride, holding onto the black steampipes coming up from the top. The place where I sat had a hinged lid, so I could stick stuff inside. It was wonderful! This might have been a Christmas present, might have been a birthday present. Dad built it for me. He came out after a shower one day and rode down the hallway sitting on it stark naked and laughing; it never occurred to me to worry about whether he was too large to ride on it, but I was certainly concerned that he'd get it all wet.

Lake Placid:

We spent only one Christmas there (so parents tell me); my memory is vague enough that I could easily have believed 2 or 3.

We set up a huge Christmas tree in the main room of the Loj where guests normally ate and played; it towered dozens of feet over my three-year-old head and had an aura of warm, dark mystery and excitement. I recall a smaller tree, brighter and less distant, in the corner of our private sitting room to the left of the door as you came in. Different years? This is the room in which [Great] Uncle Phil sat with me on the red couch (now ensconced in my own den) and read to me from a book I must have just gotten as a gift: Where Do I Come From? With the perverse logic of adults, who had tried to teach me that writing in books wasn't the best use of the media, he used a pencil to draw a little tail on the picture of a sperm under a magnifying glass. I ran and told Mom that Uncle Phil was being bad.

On Christmas morning, a dollhouse awaited me beneath the behemoth tree. A two-story middle-American home, it was made of metal of the Insert-Tab-A-Into-Slot-B variety. All of its shingles and carpets and bricks and wallpaper were printed right on the house. It had a second-floor patio. It came complete with a family (with a baby made of flesh-tone plastic) and furniture; each piece was of a different color plastic—there was a yellow bed, and a white couch... I sat and played and moved the people and the furniture around and around and peered into the rooms and imagined myself there, all in the early hours of Christmas.

Santa also brought me a real fire engine! This was also all metal, bright red, and I could sit inside it and pedal it around the room. It had a bell on the front.

A picture in the Levy family album shows me sitting on a couch in a new pair of slippers and a new plastic apron. I remember that, but I remember it not with the slippers and the apron but with a hot fire burning in the huge stone fireplace in front of me. We hung our stockings on that fireplace.

Personalized towels with cartoon characters (friends of parents? Bairds?)

Somewhere?:

Lincoln logs and stone-colored candy at Nana's.. Tinker toys? On Long Island, soaps with pictures of cartoon characters embedded all the way thru (Lucy?). [Parents say that none of this sounds familiar. Oh well!]

Santa Monica First House:

Who knows what happened to the dollhouse, but Santa must have seen how much I enjoyed it. On another dark Christmas morning, three thousand miles away, he brought me a printed metal western town. I must have shouted out loud, it was so absolutely wonderful. This is the first Christmas that the horizon of my memories expands beyond the three feet immediately surrounding me; I clearly remember kneeling and moving around alone with my delight in the darkness, the hallway to my parents' and sisters' rooms quiet behind me. I don't know how Ann and Linda slept; perhaps they were too young to be as excited as I was.

We didn't have a television set yet, so I couldn't have started watching Roy Rodgers, but I loved my western set. It had a saloon with real swinging doors. It had fences and horses with saddles that came off—and not the cheap, lightweight plastic critters, but solid, hefty, life-like molded plastic. The pieces vanished gradually over the years, but I hung tightly for a long time onto the sole cow-girl, smiling in her molded fringed skirt, and a big white horse standing solidly on all four feet and turning his head aside to watch her approach. I wanted to be like her when I grew up, she was so beautiful.

Santa Monica Second House:

Here, memories are fast and jumbled.

Before Christmas, we received advent calendars that were really boxes with little toys hidden behind each door. My own memory says that "some relative" build them for us; parents confirm that my grandparents White, with help from the Springers and the Mattesons, were the creative ones. I got a little green bird that sat on a cork; several pieces of a plastic train that hooked together; and I don't recall what else. Even these small and inexpensive things were a joy to open each night and play with.

I sang with my Sunday-School group for the BIG people in church one Christmas eve. We got together early in the day to pick out white choir robes that would fit—some had red stains on them and I asked about using dirty robes. Someone explained that they were rust stains and wouldn't come off. Mom accompanied me through the darkness to where I was supposed to be—a set of stairs leading to a door in the back of somewhere? We kids filed together into the front of the church in carefully rehearsed order, and we sang "The Carol of the Beasts" (we've now got a CD on which it is called "The Gifts They Gave"). Each beast was assigned to a group of us to sing, and then we sang the introductory and final verses together. After all this time, I'm no longer certain, but I think I sang:

"I," said the donkey, shaggy and brown,
"I carried his mother uphill and down,
I carried her safely to Bethlehem town."
"I," said the donkey, shaggy and brown.

Even that was magic.

Decorating for Christmas comes into my memories now; owning our own decorations upon which we wrote our names and the year; taking things out of boxes; standard paper Advent calendars that were exciting even without toys behind each door. I remember warm, brightly-lit evenings doing Christmassy things in the living room with my parents and sisters. Mom taught me to play "Away In A Manger" on the old 12-note wood-and-metal Xylophone that I remembered that she had played when she was a little girl--however, she disabuses me of this notion, saying "Alas, no; grandpa White found it somewhere for you girls."

I was shopping for gifts for other people at this point—with what money, I'm not sure! I gave Mom a set of shiny painted plaster wall things with hooks to hang potholders from—a head of lettuce with a pretty female face and a tomato with a smiling male face. To a five-year-old, they looked just like Dad and Mom! Being a good Mom, she hung them in her kitchen in Santa Monica. I was surprised to find recently that she had kept these things for all of these years—she gave them to me for Christmas. Now they seem destined to float forever in the limbo of Pass-Around Christmas Gifts, having served their useful life well and survived for a quarter of a century in the corner of someone's closet!

In that familiar warm Christmas morning darkness before the rest of my family arose, I scurried into the living room and discovered The Bricks. Made of cardboard printed to look like bricks, these were really giant building blocks about a foot long each and six inches high. Santa brought 12 bricks this year, 3 each of four colors: blue, brown, red, and green. He set them up to form three little chairs, one for me, one for Ann, one for Linda—and our initials were written on them with Magic Marker. I could move them around and build other things—an entire universe at my command! They were incredible toys that fed our imaginations like tinder to a wildfire. They were extremely sturdy and well-used, and moved with us to Colorado Springs and then Poughkeepsie. Santa produced dozens more each Christmas; before he was done, half a dozen years later, we could build entire forts with them all, and the original multi-colored ones remained among the later, all-red, ones until the very end. Santa brought a whole new set of bricks for my youngest sister Sharon many years later; my boyfriend John Scheff and I caught him putting them together in the living room on Christmas eve and we helped. Even that was magical—being part of creating the magic for someone else on Christmas morning.

As we unwrapped gifts, I always went for the biggest ones first. They never disappointed, either: one large package contained a whole set of china in white, pink, and yellow plastic that was just the right size for someone my age. There were plates and teacups and saucers and a creamer and sugar bowl; I still have two or three of the pieces in my toy chest downstairs for visiting children. That was magic—that someone would make big-people things in just my size.

Although the smaller packages didn't intrigue me as much, they also held some amazing things over the years.

In Santa Monica I became aware that Santa and my parents shared the same space in the universe. There were never any real clues; when I went to bed on Christmas eve, the stockings were empty and only a few gifts were under the tree, but when I'd wake in the middle of the night, a million brightly-wrapped gifts had appeared and the stockings bulged. It seems that it must have been a gradual realization rather than an instantaneous discovery, because it was not a traumatic or disappointing event in my life. Friends told me that they had crept downstairs and had seen their parents at work, and it seemed to make sense to me that that's how it worked around our place, too. I insisted, however, that if one woke up in the darkest part of the night, after even the parents had gone to bed, one could hear a faint scampering on the roof and the distant sound of sleighbells. I insisted because I had heard these sounds on previous Christmasses—and the memories of those faint sleighbells are still real to me.

Colorado Springs:

No matter who played Santa, the magic lived on. I awoke very very early Christmas morning and crept downstairs—and Santa had done it again! An electric train ran 'round the tree, and three huge stuffed Cocker Spaniel dogs sat waiting for us on the hearth, guarding three matching outifts ? [new cowboy? don't remember....] I had never owned such a large stuffed animal before, and their size astonished me. Mom or Dad came downstairs to chase me back to bed—maybe one of my sisters had joined me in the midnight raid—but we got to take our stockings and our doggies with us.

Seems we had slept barely long enough for Santa to finish his work and go upstairs to bed, and he was ready for his well-earned long winter's nap.

Poughkeepsie:

Four Christmasses there, and I began my own Santa's Helper program. After my younger sisters were in bed, I'd sneak down to the tree room and sneak a few goodies of my own to add to the magic for the others. One year, the tree was set up in the basement, and Ann joined me in my pre-midnight prowl to help set up things for the next morning. I still remember her blowing up some sort of balloons to be found Christmas morning.

For a school project, we made paper chains. The effect on me was like an early video game—there was really no such thing as an end to the creation of a paper chain as long as you could stay on your feet, hold the scissors, and cut strips of red and green construction paper for the loop. The chain grew longer each year, and I made draping it around the living room a part of my Santa's Helper ritual. Or should I say—around and around and around—

Today:

OK, now it's everyone's turn to play:

[This really means that I ran out of time. Maybe next year? (written in '91)]