Ghosts of Christmas Past

In his holiday cards, for decades, my grandpa Ralph Limber composed poems. They ranged in tone from ruminative to wry, but always rhymed. In one penned back in 1963, he jokes about having no news to report. He closes with the lines:

We love those Christmas messages
With a year-long resume
We’d do the same for you – except
There’s not a thing to say.

As I get older, I appreciate what a luxury an uneventful year can be. It means a year without high-arcing achievements and windfalls, perhaps. But it also means a year without major blows, lows or losses. It means, overall, a good year. Looking back, the no-frills, run-of-the-mill, good years made for some of the happiest holiday seasons.

Anticipation mounted higher in those years, and little traditions held greater significance. They took on an extra sheen. In our home, we kids loved that one time of year when we could make noise at the Quaker meeting. Services were usually silent, but the holiday gathering meant a children’s nativity skit and carol sing-along. If you’ve never heard my brother belt out the refrain of “Angels We Have Heard on High,” take it from me: it is glo-ooooo-ooooo-ooooorius.

Each December, we reveled in the chance to play with the stately wooden nutcrackers that spent the rest of the year in our basement. We delighted in the opportunity to get reacquainted with Frosty, Rudolph and the Grinch in dusty books otherwise relegated to a closet. We opened advent calendars with glee, and leafed through phone book-sized Sears catalogues to make wish lists of outrageously optimistic lengths.

We attended Festival Ballet’s The Nutcracker when we were too young to stay awake, and Trinity Rep’s A Christmas Carol when we were just old enough to feel intensely jealous of our friends in the cast. We built candy-covered gingerbread houses at the Athenaeum, some of which survived for years. Later, many an unsuspecting guest of ours pulled a gumdrop or nonpareil from one of these relics and nearly chipped a tooth.

This was the time of year when our mom would stay up late watching Dallas on TV and stringing stale popcorn and cranberries into garlands. They looked beautiful draped on the balsam fir tree, until the mice discovered them. Then we got a cat, and the garlands again looked lovely – until the cat scaled them in pursuit of feathery ornaments. After that, surveying the damage to upper boughs while standing in a pile of corn kernels, our mother determined the distractions of Dallas to be no match for the hassle of re-stringing those damn garlands.

Our block of Lloyd Avenue twinkled at holiday time, with electric candles in every window. Judging by our house, mountains of masking tape and a fire hazard of extension cords created the effect, but it still looked magical when viewed from the outside. Walking home on late winter afternoons, sleds in tow, the glittering houses lit our way. We’d warm up with hot cocoa inside and listen as our parents read us the latest batch of greeting cards, with news from next-door neighbors and far-flung friends alike.

As the month drew to a close, we looked forward to the big, intergenerational dinner party with our Jewish friends held every Christmas Eve. We feasted on chicken divan, spiced cranberries and stewed peaches. Everyone dressed to the nines and celebrated – not Christmas, nor Hanukkah, but the simple pleasure of being together. Though many of those sweet revelers have since passed away, it’s a tradition that continues with a smaller group to this day.

In difficult years, like 2016 has been for so many of us, there is comfort to be found in the holiday season. Banding together for parties and even forced cheer can help. We’ve made it through dark times before, as my dearly departed grandfather’s cards remind me. In one from 1938, he pairs a bit about the Czechs with the line “The democracies are nervous wrecks.” In his 1941 card, he apologizes that he’s been “too busy ducking air raid perils to dash off any Christmas carols.” In 1974, he begins with how experts say the world is going to pot and “the winds are evil-fraught.” But in the end, ever hopeful, he writes:

Come weal or woe, come calm or blow,
Come life’s most tangled knots,
To one and all at Christmas time
Goodwill and gentle thoughts.