Let’s forget the Grinch and talk about times before Christmas started offending certain twits.
Okay, maybe it was the wrong reason for liking Christmas, but it was the longest school holiday, and, if we counted weekends, we usually were off for about three weeks, until just after New Year’s.
Three weeks seemed like forever, at least on the first day, but then the time started dwindling. My older brother, Larry, and I lived in a unique environment where relatives were in the house most of the time, and I think we looked forward to becoming adults so we could fool around at home whenever we wanted. Little did we (or maybe I should say “I”) acknowledge that we would undoubtedly have to go to work every day, and we wouldn’t get those long vacations for Christmas unless we became teachers, I suppose.
Anyway, our mother was a stay-at-home mom, which was pretty normal during those days. Our paternal grandmother ran a rooming house (our house) during the summer, and spent most of her time in the kitchen during the winter. When she wasn’t sewing something or baking cookies, pies, or cakes, or making supper, she was canning vegetables for “the hard times during the winter,” as she always said. One of the things she canned was watermelon rinds, and it seemed pretty normal to not throw the rinds in the trash, because she wanted to can them. I never tried them, but I think they were probably pickled, or something.
Our Aunt Minnie also hung around the house and I don’t remember her ever having a real job, although she was pretty much the chambermaid and laundress for the rooming house during the summer. She also did much of the grocery shopping, although our grandmother sometimes walked to Taylor’s Market, pulling her two-wheeled shopping cart behind her.
Our Uncle Charles featured himself as a writer, and he was, but he quit a couple of real jobs to pursue freelance writing. He lived on a pittance, largely supported by others in the house, but that’s another story not worth telling.
Uncle Jack, Minnie’s husband, usually had a job, either bar tending or, in later years, as a general worker and painter on Fun Pier.
After our grandmother died, Wally, a handyman, moved in, and he did some remodeling of the interior, not all of which I liked.
So it’s easy to see why it seemed to me that if I were in school I was probably missing out on whatever happened to be going on at home. Christmas vacation gave us time to live that experience, and, while many other kids had mothers at home I doubt that many had a small mob milling about constantly.
Our Aunt Minnie took us each year on the train to Philadelphia to do Christmas shopping, and we got to watch the window displays and the model train layouts. Wanamaker’s had a monorail, called the “Glitter Bug,” that ran around the perimeter of the toy department. Those days are gone. Strangely enough, though, our trip to Philly usually involved skipping school. I guess Christmas vacation was too late to be ordering things back then. We’d also get to see Santa and tell him what we wanted, but it was hard to understand how every department store could feature Santa at the same time.
Near City Hall, at Broad and Market Streets, shoppers bustled here and there, and street vendors sold everything from hot dogs to roasted chestnuts. Don’t ask me why, but I remember buying not only chestnuts to roast at home, but tangerines. Back then we always visited Wanamaker’s, Gimbels, Strawbridge and Clothier, and Lit Brothers. These are now giants of the past, and most have been bought out by other chains, and renamed. Macy’s seems to be a popular name now. Remember, Gimbels started the Gimbel’s Thanksgiving Day Parade in Philadelphia, and it was four years later that Macy’s started their own parade in New York City.
Larry and I got involved in putting up our train set, something I mentioned before, and it never seemed to be quite finished. We helped trim the tree – or trees, because each side of the house had its own, and I remember a few occasions when we went on excursions in the woods to find a suitable tree. The only times we had a spruce tree were when we bought the tree from someplace that was selling them. A tree taken from the wild was usually a cedar tree, I believe, although some of our other relatives sought out pine trees, but I think the branches are too sparse to make them worthy of consideration.
Our Christmas holidays were great, and we had some good times with our friends in the neighborhood, although we only had the last week of vacation to play with whatever we found under the tree. At some point we’d go to a party to see Santa and would be given a mesh stocking with various nuts, candy canes, hard candy, and an orange, for some reason.
I don’t know when Larry stopped believing in Santa, but then again, I don’t know when I stopped believing. One year, however, rather early in the night, we looked out our front window and saw Santa Claus climbing the steps of Ricky Svard’s house across the street, a sack slung over his shoulder. That removed all doubt, and we decided it was a good time to head for bed, and that’s probably the earliest we ever turned in on Christmas Eve!
Neither of us ever got a stocking full of coal, although we were threatened with that possible fate more than once. Actually, our Christmases were all great back then, but that was before the time of the Grinch and the ACLU.