A Child's Christmas... in Maryland
The first house I have any memory of was the one we lived in in a place called Halfway--
because that's about what it was between Hagerstown and Williamsport in that skinny
neck of Maryland from which you can get to Pennsylvania or West Virginia pretty quickly. It's a lovely rolling valley there, with the mountains always on the western
horizon. Other than the summer yard that rose up the little hill behind the house
and had rocks growing out of it and older neighbors next door, across the street,
and a few houses up the street who evidently had a good time watching my folks and their
growing family, I mostly remember Christmases in that house. As it got colder and
colder, my folks would take us on rides "to see the lights." We'd see houses and
stores lit up with colored lights, then go past the big tree on an island and so reflected
in the City Park lake in Hagerstown and at the end of the ride circle the square
of that small city where there would be the biggest evergreen I could imagine, lighted,
with a star on top. I was sure you could see it for a thousand miles.
On Christmas Eve our usual bedtime routine changed a little, with my parents insisting
that we put out a plate of cookies and milk for Santa Claus in the living room.
That was the culmination of the growing excitement of the season of lights and radio
broadcasts by Santa and his helper Roly Poly who read kids letters and played the current
Christmas music. In the morning there was a real-life fairy land in our living room--the
furniture had been moved a bit to accomodate our very own Christmas tree with lights and glass balls and tinsel and underneath, an electric train. And all around
there were toys and gifts--the one I especially remember was a child-size kitchen
cabinet, painted green with tan doors decorated with stenciled-on flowers.
The December I was five and a half--my sister had just turned four and our baby brother,
two-- we moved into what the adults referred to as Daddy's "homeplace" in Hagerstown.
His parents had just built a new house some 3 blocks away. It was the first December weekend of 1941. I can't remember now whether that first wartime Christmas
was when the merchants and homeowners turned off the lights or that the "blackout"
started the next year. But I do remember the sad darknes of those Decembers before
the return of the Christmas tree in the square and all the other lights when the war was
finally over.
What kept the season real for all of us during those dark years and beyond was the
annual get together in our grandparents' basement rec room each Christmas night.
Aunts, uncles, cousins--my father had two sisters and five brothers--our numbers
grew as the years went on. As the oldest grandchild, I got to play with a lot of babies over
the years, to listen in on some of the adult conversations, and to take my share
of the teasing from Grandpop and the various uncles. The adults, I think, may have
exchanged some gifts, but I know they always took something special for my grandparents
and each family had a little something for all of us grandchildren which went into
a pack for one of the uncles dressed as Santa Claus to Ho Ho Ho! and pass around.
And we feasted. Grandmom always served good food. There was one time, however, when
she had baked a pie which she handed to someone else who began to cut into it only
to discover it was full of buttons and dried beans! But then, of course, when Grandmom gave out her beautifully wrapped presents, no one was ever sure who would get her
special trick gift of a pair of chicken feet. Laughter and Love prevailed, made
more poignant by the deaths of two of the uncles in the war. For years afterward
Uncle Pete's childless widow still sent "Mum" a Christmas present, and Uncle Don's widow always
saw to it that their three girls got there for the Christmas night festivities.
The last time I was present for that family Christmas party was in 1960. The following
year we were learning to cope with a newborn; our first son was born less than two
weeks before Christmas and we were in Chicago, Illinois,--a long way from Maryland.
And the developing maturation that had been marked early on by my graduation to
"Santa's helper" after my younger sibs were put to bed, now culminated in the definitive
end of my childhood with the responsibility for providing for the magic and nurture
of a new generation.
The family celebration of the Christmas holiday will always be central in my memories
of seasons past. But then as now, the holiday was the center of the season. The
weeks of preparation that went before involved me in activities at church and school.
It seems as if from the time I could talk I always had a recitation or a song for
Children's Day in the summer and for Christmas in the winter. Those were the days
of Shirley Temple movies and you can bet I spent long hours on Saturday afternoon
with my hair done up in rags so that a very curly-headed little Beverly would appear on the
Christmas stage to say her piece or sing a solo--at least once, I am told, I stopped
the proceedings long enough to announce first that my Daddy was playing the piano
for me to sing. I also liked the Christmas Tea the Missionary Society always put on.
Youngsters were invited and treated to warm milk tea with the best assortment of
cookies we would see all year. The tea was especially exciting, since we were not
usually allowed adult substances like tea and coffee and Coca Cola until we had at least reached
teenage.
Twice, as I remember it now, I got to be front and center in the Christmas pageant
as the Mother in the manger scene. For one of the church pageants I sang a lullaby
that started, "Sleep, my little Jesus, on thy bed of hay... ." (Years later, when
I had chosen to become a Unitarian Universalist, I ran across that lullaby again only
to discover the words had been written by William Channing Gannet when he was the
Unitarian minister in Rochester, New York, just about a hundred years ago.) I didn't
sing, nor did I have any lines when I played the same Madonna role in a high school presentation.
But a picture of the tableau ran in the local newspaper and so there was my photo
and my name for the tens of thousands who subscribed to that daily to see. It was enough to make a teenager ignore the season and think instead of a career on the
stage. Well, momentarily at least.
When I was young the week from Christmas to New Year's felt like what a student of
comparative religions and calendars would call "intercalary days"--a time out of
time before time begins again. For me, the year that Parents Magazine book salesman
sold Mom on buying books for the three oldest of us (there were five by then) was the
year I discovered books with gusto! My particular present under the tree that year
was a series of 5 volumes: Teenage Mystery Classics! I read all of them that week,
and the two volumes of Black Beauty my sister Janet got and whatever my brother Paul got
--I have forgotten--as well. And that Christmas went all the way to May or June;
since when we went back to school, I got to comparing reading notes with Herbie in
Art class. We started our own little competition to see who could devour the most mysteries
and adventure novels before the school year was over. The fallout from that friendly
contest--I don't remember who "won"-- was getting to know Herbie better and a recognition that he represented the very small Jewish community in Hagerstown. I learned
they didn't celebrate Christmas, although it would be years yet till I really encountered
the Chanukah tradition which shares the year-end season. But I do know that when
it was my responsibility for opening exercises in home room in high school some years
later, I remembered and read only from what we Protestants Christians knew as the
Old Testament out of regard for Herbie and the few other kids I knew did not share
the majority religious tradition.
I will always be who I am in large part because of the family and church and school
I where I belonged as a child growing up in Maryland. In the gentle arms of family
I first encountered the final loss that is death. At church and school, I was fortunate enough to be a "star" so I could strut my stuff before appreciative classmates and
adults. There were youngsters in school of differing economic, ethnic, and religious
backgrounds to help me begin to apprehend that the world beyond childhood would be
richer and much more complicated. I was--I am-- indeed blessed.
It is now more than half a century since war blacked out the Christmas lights and
the Tree in the middle of the town square. Unlike my child self, and despite all
the artificial lights, I now mind the growing dark as the year wanes toward the solstice.
I find I am turning to preparations for celebrations and homecomings sometimes as
if whistling in the dark since I am so sobered by losses and the knowledge of the
terrible vulnerability of the sick and the destitute in the deepening dark and cold.
I know enough now of the history of the past four or five millenia of human experience
and the religious mythologies our kind has evolved to express and communicate the
mysteries we encounter as human creatures--enough to suspect the historical claims
for the majority tradition I grew up in. I've seen enough now of adults assuming special
privilege in the eye of a parental deity when engaged in warring with others, that
I have come to recognize the imperialist tyranny involved when any nation, religion,
or clan claims to be the only right one.
Knowing full well how important and enriching it is that we acknowledge the changing
seasons, and especially this one when the lengthening shadows begin at last to shorten
toward the turmoil and chaos of returning life in this hemipshere of the planetary garden we depend on for our very sustenance. I would, if I could, redesign the celebration
of year-end, year-beginning.
I would continue to make it a time of magic for our young. Each new baby needs to
be bedazzled by lights that mirror the wheeling stars overhead. However, we might
consider saving the lights for that last week of the year, the intercalary days,
rather than, as currently, being dazed and irritated by displays that last for months. I
would also that we redesign this season to become a celebration of the whole human
family, with none excluded so that all are welcome to share the tears and laughter,
the generational responsibilities, the teasing and feasting, regardless of all those differences
we so often list which only identify our apartness.
And while we so celebrate the universe (the one turn of our world toward another cycling
year) I would expect that we will experience an expanding awareness of the histories
that separate, leaving their legacy of enmity, giving way to a growing appreciation of the various symbols and mythologies that have accrued to this season over the
millenia not as competing ideologies but as signs of the unifying abundance of human
apprehensions and expressions of Greater Truth yet to be more fully realized and
embraced.
After all, we are born children of the light, uttterly dependent on solar energy for
our physical sustenance, challenged by the mystery of the twinkling lights in the
night sky to discover or make meaning of our existence. We come into the human family,
creatures of special ability and vulnerability, ever dependent on each other for our
own identity and sense of worth. For a little while we occupy space and time in
a world of bewildering proportions although we did not choose to be born. May we
therefore, during this season of heightened memory, be gentle with ourselves and others.
And may the year around the corner encompassing all the joys and sadnesses, irritations
and blessings our kind must needs experience be a time of moving toward peace for
the human community and all creatures, things and processes which also participate in
the universal p Web of Life.
The sermon in a Unitarian Universalist setting is never the last word
on any subject, but rather an invitation to further dialog.
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