For the past month I have been engaged in the seemingly endless task of sorting through twenty years of my correspondence, manuscripts, and lecture notes for transmittal to the Minnesota Historical Society. Now and then I come across things I would like to share with others once more. The following excerpt is from an article written in the 1970s. It could easily have been written for this year's Commonweal Christmas issue.
"He has a pointy nose," said my little sister Ellen, looking at the plaster Christ Child with outflung arms and curly brown hair. I was only seven then and shocked at such irreverent comment on a holy object, and more shocked at the unrepressed laughter of the grownups.
The plaster figure had been a concession on their part to the solemn piety and customs my middle sister Anne and I were acquiring at the parish school. For the first time that year we had a Christmas crib, as we called it then in Minnesota, using the old English word for "manger"— the fashionable word "crèche" was to come into use later.
Our crib was not completely satisfactory. We did not have the numerous attendant figures which made the cnb in our church so wonderful, we did not have shepherds and sheep, not even an angel. Our curiously mature infant was backed by a disproportionately small china Virgin, which had been my grandmother's, and was usually in our bedroom, and by a Saint Joseph who stared straight ahead in rather splendid indifference, holding his staff with the lily.
But it was our crib, and we had surrounded it—three small girls in flannel nightgowns, our small brother in his woolly, footed sleeper. We said our prayers and sang "Silent Night." Then we were hurried off to our cold rooms, to beds high with quilts. There we would—though shivery with the almost unbearable excitement of Christmas Eve—drift into sleep with the muffled sound of the grownups, moving mysteriously about, coming through the registers in the floor.
The tree would have gone up only that afternoon, because we did not begin Christmas earlier in those days But it would stay up through New Year's and five days more until Little Christmas, which we later learned to call Epiphany, the feast of the three kings.
That year when I was seven, we still used candles to light the tree, clipped to the branches in small silvery holders. As soon as it was faintly dark they were lit and glowed and flickered dangerously, evoking the first magic of Christmas Eve, which for us began at dark.
We would have been out that afternoon—escorted by Evelyn, the "hired girl," as excited as we—laden with little boxes of Christmas cookies which she and my mother had been baking all week, wafer-thin ginger and sugar cookies in the shape of chicks and rocking horses, bells and wreaths.
In each house we visited there was the excitement of the tree going up and the smell of baking ginger or mince. We presented our cookies and received a gift of the specialty of each house in return—gingerbread, fresh-made peanut brittle, white Christmas fudge, candied orange peel.
Now, after the first lighting of the tree, we would bundle up to go out again with my father and mother to our grandmother's house for Christmas Eve supper.
We ran before them, our feet in buckled overshoes making squeaking noises in the packed snow underfoot, a sound peculiar to our freezing northern winter. Although we did not know it then, we were running from the celebration of Christmas awaited to the celebration of Christmas remembered.
My cheerful, kindly grandfather was living then, but I thought of it as my grandmother' s house. She was at its center—a bright-eyed woman with a fine, highbridged nose and high arched brows under masses of white hair. My grand-aunt lived there, too, and my young unmarried aunt, a teacher, would be home for the holidays.
We children would fight to be the first to ring the bell by twisting the black, wrought-iron handle—and then burst in before anyone could answer, bringing the cold with us into the living room which seemed only an antechamber to the large dining room and the kitchen which were the center of living in that house.
The dining room would have lost its everyday look. On Christmas Eve the table was extended with leaves and covered with damask, its hem-stitched border touching the floor. It was set with my grandmother' s best china and silver and crowded with covered dishes and cut-glass bowls soon to be passed round and round with cranberry sauce, dill pickles, and spiced crab apples, with mashed potatoes, buttered yellow squash, and fruit salad. And last of all, the warm platter was brought from the kitchen heaped with codfish cakes in cream sauce.
The Christmas Eve brought to us in our grandmother's house was a Christmas which had been carried from a fisherman's cottage in the west of Ireland to a stone house in Nova Scotia, then to a log house on a claim in the Minnesota Territory, and finally to this small, green-shuttered clapboard house a stone's throw from the Mississippi in our little countyseat town.
It was the Christmas of a people accustomed to scarcity but with a great love of being together, of talking and eating and sharing a quiet sense of fun. The heart of it was the ingathering family feast in the evening and the Mass at dawn. Aside from the gleaming table and a small heap of wrapped gifts, its outward sign was the candle in the front window, "lighting the Christ Child on his way."
Over our heads as we sat at the table the talk went around of past Christmases when the house was crowded with my young uncles and my other aunt, before they had homes of their own.
Now and again the talk went further back to Christmases on the farm, to evenings of corn-popping and taffy pulls, of vacations where Grand-Aunt Nell's friends came out from town in bobsleds for an evening of sliding down the hills in the farm's great wooden butter bowls, of whirling round and laughing under the winter stars. We ate and we listened, not liking the codfish much, but knowing it was part of Christmas and prologue to the morning. Our grandmother's Christmas merged easily into ours.
We went back to our different signs of Christmas—to the tree and the crib, the stockings hanging on a twine line across the mantel, to our vague belief in Santa Claus and the certainty of wonderful presents to come. There was yet no Midnight Mass and we were thought too small to get up at four and struggle through the winter dark to the dawn Mass, but we were up and waiting impatiently at the head of the stairs when our parents came home.
As soon as we saw their shadows on the glass of the front door, we catapulted down the stairs and leaped on them, hugging and shouting, "Merry Christmas," feeling the cold of outdoors on my mother's fur and laughing at the frost on my father's mustache. Then with them into the living room where the stockings were now full and wonders lay about the tree. We never questioned how it was that the dolls were so beautifully outfitted or that my brother's tricycle was the image of the most expensive one in Fred O'Reilly's store—the one my grandfather had looked at again and again. It is only now in remembering that we can be grateful for the hours which went into the sewing and my grandfather's painful saving.
Background to our delight was my mother' s laughing and my father's exclamations of feigned surprise. My mother lived only two more years after that Christmas, and my father never seemed to me the same again. Perhaps I have layered that Christmas with memories of Christmases which came before and after it. But it has been at the heart of all Christmases since. In remembering it, I know that Christmas is, quite literally, the feast of joy come into the world. Christmas is our joy remembered and the certainty that joy can be given. It is enough to have known it once.
