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This time of year brings many memories flooding in, for most of us, of years past, especially for me it seems my childhood holiday experiences. Family Man wrote a diary on Village Blue the other day that inspired me to share this story of one of my ‘Christmas past’s’ that I wrote last year and ask you to share your stories as well.
The house I lived in as a young child in Salisbury, Pa. was a dream and has been in my dreams for my whole life, I still walk the halls, climb the the polished mahogany front stairs and clamber down the back one, wander from room to room and still see the beautiful tall Christmas tree in the “sun parlor.” In our house the tree never appeared for sister and I until Christmas morning, all lit and decorated with all the old German decorations saved and passed on for generations. Spread beneath was a picnic of presents all gaily wrapped.
The entire house would be decorated with pine brought in from the woods nearby, decorated with balls and bows, laurel from another spot in the mountains where it grew wild and sometimes sprayed with a touch of gold, all tied together with a beautiful big bow.
Christmas was a big deal in my family, perhaps from the German heritage, where Christmas was celebrated long ago and before it was widely adopted from, I believe the German Americans culture.In the fall the candy making would be started, my family made pounds and pounds, grandmother even sold some/lots at Christmas (In fact there would be a steady stream of customers to pick up their orders as Christmas neared)…it went the full range, from caramels, fudge, toffee, mints, divinity, maple sugar candy, all the way to the families all time favorite. Fondant wrapped around peanut butter and then dipped in bitter sweet chocolate. No one could ever have enough of that candy, it was such a hit and no one but our family seemed to make it..
It was a very tedious project to make this candy, started out with boiling sugar, water and cornsyrup till it was soft ball stage, then pouring this molten hot liquid into cooled turkey platters. Once the mixture was cool to the touch, a spoonful of vanilla would be splashed on and then the turning began.
Butter knives were used to scraped and stir the thick sticky and clear mixture until it started to turn to white, just then you had to gather togther and form into balls before it went totally hard. Then wrapped in waxed paper it was laid on trays on the nice cold porch to temper..24 hours later and it was brought back inside to warm,soften and to be “worked”. That meant to squeeze and kneed until the consistancy was soft and pliable.Now it was ready for the peanut butter dabbed in the middle of a little flat circle, rolled in your hands to make an egg shape and then placed on the cookie sheet to go back outside again for another cooling down period. When sufficiently cool it was dipped in the chocolate and then placed on cookie sheets again for the next trip outside…
After it was cooled again, it was carefully packed in canisters to be stored on that same porch until it was needed, most especially for Christmas.
In some ways you might say the preparations for Christmas went on for months as candy, cookies, fruit cakes, rum cakes and some pies were prepared in advance and we did have unlimited freezer space on that back porch.
On Christmas morning we would rush downstairs to find the beautifully decorated tree and as was the custom in our family, opening presents was carried on throughout the day…my favorite memory of presents was a box full of handmade clothes for a new Toni Doll, some of them hand knitted by my mom…I was enchanted and in some ways inspired to design clothes later on in my life.
Anyway, Christmas was wonderful for me as a kid, and the memories are always lurking in the back of my mind.
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So that’s one of my memory stories, now tell us yours.
A couple more Old time Christmas Cards.
FARFetched over at DK (I think that’s the name he uses over there) is doing a podcast of holiday memories. Check out the post at http://farmanor.blogspot.com/ .
Mine comes out to about six minutes . . .
Very early on in my childhood the highlight of the holiday would be going to the tree farm and cutting down out own tree. It was one of the few things that my dad felt we had brain enough to do on our own. We had a bay window in the livingroom with side windows and dad would usually have to tie the try to each window sash si it wouldn’t fall down. Our cat Boots would always end up climbing the tree.
Hi aloha, in my family in the 40’s, someone would go out to the woods and cut a tree, don’t even think they had tree farms then and surely not in rural Pa. I don’t think we even got to see the tree at all till Xmas morn. when it was fully dressed.
That must have been great fun for you to cut your own tree.
My earliest childhood Christmas memory would have been from about 1960, when I was five. America was space mad in those days, and every kid knew the names of Alan Shepard and John Glenn. Cowboys were passe. We all wanted to be astronauts.
I remember leaving the door open, just a crack, on Christmas Eve and leaving one eye slightly open so I could see if I could catch Santa Claus in the act. Well of course my mother came and closed the door before anything interesting happened. In the morning I awoke and found a space helmet under the tree with the NASA logo on it. Just like the astronauts wore, I was sure!
Thanks for your story,How cool that you got that space helmet. In Christmas 1960 I was in my final high school year and my first one in Ca.
I was just talking yesterday to one of my daughters now 30 about Christmas’s past and she recalled the year she was permitted to sleep on the couch by the tree, so that she could catch Santa delivering presents.
She said she tried to stay awake but she was extatic upon waking in the morn to find the array of presents and the cookies and milk gone.
Well I said, I guess your mom was pretty good to do all that without waking you, wow. I don’t recall the exact time, but can imagine myself tiptoeing in and out. To her it was the most wonderful Christmas ever and she will never forget…Now she has a new little one to give those memories to.
The first seven years of my life were centered around my grandparents house in Garden City, Long Island.
It took little encouraging to gather our extended family there anytime for songs, jokes, wonderful home-cooked dinners from Grandma’s kitchen. I don’t remember ever hearing a voice raised in harshness, let alone anger, at any of those family celebrations. The annual Christmas gathering was the pinnacle of the year, with all the trappings. The grandkids (us) even got custom-made gingerbread boys and girls from Grandma’s oven, decorated with silvery candy coat buttons and frosted smiles.
Then, between my first and second grades at school, my parents made a decision to leave the city. We moved to a small midwestern town near my other grandparents. At Christmas time, we often returned to Long Island and my beloved maternal grandparents to celebrate the holidays as in times past. For several years we boarded the “Spirit Of St. Louis” that passed through Indianapolis on the Pennsylvania Railroad. The train ran right to Grand Central Station in Manhattan and then we would take the Long Island Railroad commuter train to a stop within a block of my grandparents’ house.
There was little sleep to be had on those overnight rides; too many wonders to see as we passed through the backyards of a hundred cities and towns. There were lighted decorations everywhere and the chance to spy a Christmas tree through an open curtain every now and then as we sped by. There were massive dark factory walls and silent switchyards and the deisel-smoked mountain tunnels of western Pennsylvania. For my brother and I, the most exciting spot on the line was the Horseshoe Curve at Altoona, PA, where, if you were near the back of the train, you could look out and see the engines going in the opposite direction. It was after midnight when we’d round the curve and a big thrill to the small boys we were then.
I’m the grandpa now. The old folks left many years ago, but the kid that I once was is still alive in a small way and in my memory, so are they.
What great memories you have shared with us…I was reminded of my own train trips through Western Pa. on cold winter days.
I always loved the site of the moon shining on snow covered forests. For many years my father took us every weekend to grandma’s house 2 hours drive away, on Pa. turnpike and then many miles of twisting and turning roads through the mountains to her house.
As I recall no storm was big enough to prevent this trip, even hurricanes and snow that was falling so thick you could not see 100 feet ahead.
These trip were especially fun when my father purchased a soft top Thunderbird, no heater could keep us warm those days.
Snow, thoughts of Christmas begin with snow. Maybe that’s why my favorite poem of the season is Dylan Thomas’ A Child’s Christmas in Wales, which I read every year. Maybe it was the delight at waking up to see a snowstorm outside, then listening to the radio with an eager ear for the news that all schools were closed (snowplows didn’t do the job for school buses then on Greenfield Hill in CT). Next, it was a jog down Old Academy Road to see if the pond had frozen over, so I could put on three pairs of wool socks to fill the ice skates my mother always bought two sizes too big, in case I became a Yehti overnight. I’ve kept my old engulfing scarf, Yale-blue and white stripes, which saw service in Massachusetts ski camp, in the winters of Manhattan and Chicago and now waits for it to snow here, near the Pacific in California, a scarf of patience.
Music was as big a part of Christmas as the tree, the dinner of roast beef and yorkshire pudding, and A Christmas Carol with Alistair Sims. The “Hallelujah Chorus” was always thrilling. Years later, in 1960, I first heard another one of my favorite songs of the season, with a Brahms tune adapted by the Kingston Trio:
Snow days, I don’t recall that we had many that our school system deemed too severe for closing, so we had to trudge our uphill mile to school on days when cars couldn’t make it up.
At Grandma’s house we had a little pond right below her property that we spent many a cold winter weekend, twirling and falling,(mostly)on the ice. The pond never had a good smooth surface so their were many obstacle but we soldiered on.
Thanks for sharing.
Many thanks to everyone who shared their holiday memories with us, I do so love to read them and find we have many common memories.
I do hope more of you will share your stories and for those that have never written on the site, this is an great way to ease into participating.
So share, share, share, holiday stories, snow stories, winter stories, whatever, some winter pics would be nice too for me, who loves the snow pics.
Speaking of weather, we had some great torrential downpours last night, here in Socal, so beware east coast we have sent it on it’s way too you. I guess No. Cal. is sending their system on to midwest.
and here. . .
painting by Joan Wear
Hugs
Shirl