Memories of being a child at Christmastime . . .
Here’s an odd thing. I have few memories of the actual presents I got. That wasn’t because my parents didn’t choose well. Once I got a telescope, which I still have, and which I’ve played around with over the years — in 1985 I got to look at Halley’s Comet through it, and I’ve seen Jupiter’s giant red spot, and Saturn’s rings, and the polar ice caps on Mars, and a sign from a distant star reading, “I see you!” Actually, no, I didn’t see that. Anyway, my strongest memories are of people. There we are, wide awake, our parents sometimes bleary-eyed, and we’re opening the presents, with wrapping paper everywhere, and the family dog wagging its tail and sniffing around, and my father capturing the morning on his home-movie camera — no sound, but still us in our youth and mirth. Or I remember going to the general store run by friendly old Max Mermelstein, one of my father’s clients — Dad sold insurance, and because he always stuck up for his clients when they submitted claims, they were grateful. So Max would give my father a discount at Christmastime, and he’d take all four of us kids to Max’s store, where each of us would choose presents for the other three, each with about $20 to spend. That was fun.
But we also had a tradition — I mean the family on my mother’s side. She was one of six siblings, and all six families lived in our small town, five of them within a five minutes’ walk of Nanna and Nonno’s house. We’d all get together in one of the houses, with Nanna and Nonno, where they would open their presents from the families. Altogether there were 33 of us, the patriarch and matriarch, their children and their spouses, and 19 grandchildren. So we’d set one table against another against another in a big line, grownups and boys and girls of all sizes, from gangly cowlicked teenage boys to little babies barely toddling on their pudgy legs. A feast, with all kinds of pie for dessert, and it was good for us children too, to see the honor done to those two sweet old people, and to be part of a big celebration in which we were not getting anything at all, but we could watch while Nanna and Nonno opened their gifts and viewed them with real and childlike delight.
Of course we went to Christmas Mass, all together. Since it was a holiday, that meant we’d be dressed up (as we often were for Mass in any case), boys in suits and ties, girls in pretty dresses. The church would be packed, more than on other Sundays, though ours was well attended then too, even with the five Masses in the morning. After that, we’d go to my father’s homestead three miles away, where Grandma and Grandpa lived. My father was one of ten siblings that lived to adulthood (a beautiful older sister, Teresa, died of leukemia at age seven on the day my father was born), and five of the families lived nearby, but often some of the other five would come home for Christmas too, so there might be again more than 30 people, easily, all in one little house to celebrate. Where to sit the children for dinner? Easy: two and two, up the staircase from top to bottom!
That wasn’t the end of it, though. On my mother’s side, each family would invite the others to come over and visit during the holidays, bringing the kids, not for dinner but for snacks and checking out the Christmas trees and (for us boys) watching football or shooting pool, while the girls did — what did they do? They chatted and had their own fun. And again, I must have seen hundreds and hundreds of presents, but I don’t remember them. I remember the people, and I thank God with all my heart that he gave me the gift of knowing them. And still we aren’t yet at the center of it all.
What various of my cousins understood of it, I don’t know, but I knew, and my brother and my sisters knew, that the only reason for those bright and colorful lights in the dark wintry world was that a little child was born in a place called Bethlehem, long ago. Well did Fra Angelico, in his painting of the last judgment, have children dancing with angels in a ring, in a happy garden, unaware of anything in the world but joy and innocence and the almighty God, born among us on Christmas.
And you see that I’ve been ringing changes on our Word of the Week, children. It’s like brethren in this way: a “double plural,” which came about because people no longer sensed the old plurals — brether and childer — as really plural, so they tacked on a second plural, -en, by analogy with men, oxen, women, kine, and a few other such that still hung around. Old English had two words for child: bearn, which had to do with having borne the child, so you weren’t just a bearn, but somebody’s bearn; and cild, which simply referred to a child in general without reference to anybody else. In some early modern English dialects, though, you’d hear bairn for a boy and child for a girl, and in Old English, gyrele referred to a little child of either sex. But once they got a little older, a boy might be called a cniht and a girl a maegthen: how about that! Knights and maidens — not a bad thing, for children to think of themselves in that pure and friendly way.
As the great day draws near: joy and peace to all children everywhere, those who are fresh-faced and young, and those who remember when they were.
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