Kristin and Seeth were over for dinner. It was the week before Christmas and I had my only Christmas decoration out on the dining room table. It was a Christmas tree that I had inherited from my mother, which she had cherished and I had remembered as a child.
It was old. As old as memory and as valuable as such, too. And like all memory, it was as rich as it was fragile. And as old. For such is the value of memory.
But I digress. The item in question is a little tree, barely two feet tall. It stands on a table with a light bulb within and glass rods extending out from the center and ending in little bulbs around the plastic needles of the faux fir tree that it is supposed to represent. It’s quaint. It’s old. It’s 1950’s old. And I loved it. Love it. I love it still.
I pull it out every Christmas and plug it in. Well, I replaced the electric cord. The old one was cloth bound and looked like a housefire praying to happen, so I replaced it with an extension cord that I bought at Home Depot. One you might use to hook up Christmas lights in your window. Another habit of old that I miss. We used to have blue lights twinkling in our windows every Christmas season and casual decorations inside, one of them being the Christmas tree with its single light bulb and glittering nobs amongst the grassy verge. It looked grassy, anyway. Or green and fir-like.
“How old is that?” Kristin asked me. She had seen it before. I bring it out like a tired relic every twenty-fifth of December. It is my only nod to tradition. The only one I had left in tact as it were. Christmas. Christmas should mean something. Somewhere. And for somebody. Even if it meant nothing more to me.
“That?” I said. “You’ve seen that before. It’s the Christmas tree that I got from your Grammy. It was a present to them. A wedding present.” And then the story began.
“Your Grammy and Grampa were married while he was on shore leave from the navy,” I began. “It was Christmas 1945 and he was privileged to receive a holiday shore leave, which was not a thing to be taken lightly. You see, your Grampa had already served a stint in the navy long before the war. In 1931 when he was a young man in Kansas and his family had just lost their farm.
“Yes, it could have been from a Jimmy Stewert movie. Or a Warner Brothers cartoon with Snidely Whiplash coming to take away their farm in foreclosure. Except it wasn’t funny. It was real and Snidely didn’t twiddle his moustache. He just took their farm. In 1931 my father was an 18 year old boy in the depression era United States with nothing, nowhere, and not a hope of betterment. And they had just lost everything.
“So what was a young man from Kansas to do?” I posed. ”He chose the obvious. To go as far away from the center of the land he grew up in, as far away from Kansas as he could, which was an ocean. Pick one. Atlantic. Pacific. He was all there.” I willed for Kristin to understand. Understanding is such a terrible burdon.
“So your Grampa joined the navy.” I continued. “What else could an 18 year old farmer boy in a collapsing economy do?”
He got out five years later with an education you don’t get in school, then went back to school in Colorado. He studied machining. He was a machinist by trade.
Then when World War 2 broke out he knew he was on the list, as was every able-bodied man in sight. Not wanting to be raked into the army and assigned to one of its cannon fodder brigades, your Grampa re-upped with the boys in steel ships and bellbottom pants. He had seniority and made it all the way to chief before he left the service. That’s one level below ensign which was a commissioned rank. After nine years and a world war he had had enough.
And he managed Christmas leave in 1945. That’s nothing to sniff at. Most soldiers and sailors were mopping up after the mess that two world wars had left in their wakes and many had to serve in the interim. But Grampa had seniority and, well, rank has its privileges and so does experience and just plain the endurance of time, so he got a break for Christmas.
And he came home to his bride to be in Canterbury, Connecticut and made her his wife of fact on the twenty fourth of December, 1945. And they celebrated like every young couple does and received presents to celebrate their nuptials one of which was a Christmas tree lit with an electric bulb in the middle and illuminating glass rods that elucidated tiny pricks of light all over the tree. It was brilliant. And now it is mine.
Grampa, my Dad, left the navy early due to his aforementioned seniority which gave him an advantage over all of the young men returning from the war and looking for all too few jobs to provide for the all too many young families, mine being just one of the new, urbanite 1950’s families that were growing all across the country that was becoming something like none of us had experienced before. It was new. It was modern. It was urban. And it was electrifying.
“Years later, your Grammy gave me this Christmas tree,” I told Kristin, showing off the nearly discarded effigy of a past time. I had left it in a box next to our driveway for years. It had been rained upon and knee deep in snow for years before I noticed it and retrieved it from its exile.
“How could I have abandoned this?” I demanded of myself as I rescued the discarded item and brought it inside, still not sure what to do with it. “It’s just a piece of junk from the 50’s, after all,” I thought. But still.
It had a pull all of its own. A gravity that nostalgia bequeaths to its siblings. One which is the daughter of memory and the son of what must not be forgotten. And I remembered.
I repaired the lamp cord. The old one was a cloth bound wire that was probably still serviceable, but I figured a new, more modern cord was a sensible investment. Bulbs come and go, of course. I made sure it had a 15 watt incandescent, just to insure it had that Nicola Tesla glow at the tips of the glass. “I like Christmas lights to be warm, after all,” I thought. “LED’s are just too cold.” And all was well with the world.
“Is this as old as you are?” Kristin asked me. “No, actually older,” I answered. “This was a Christmas present to your Grammy and Grampa on their wedding day on Christmas, 1945. In September of 1946, a barely legal nine months later, your uncle Mike was born. It was a good time to be alive,” I thought and said. And it was, indeed.
And it still is a good time to be alive. Merry Christmas to all. May your Christmas lights shrine brightly.
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