OH TANNENBAUM!

 I haven’t had a Christmas tree in years...decades actually. Part of living far from your own family, and far from your adopted family, and of being a hermit by nature is that traditions kind of go out the window.

Virginia, my wife, always spends Christmas with her family in Buenos Aires, a thousand miles from here—here being Northern Patagonia in the Andes Mountains. We never travel together. We have lots of pets and our place to take care of, and we never leave them alone. If I’m gone, she’s home. If she’s gone, I’m home. So I plan my visits back “home” to the US for other times of the year, which is okay by me, because I always rent a car and like to get around while I’m back Stateside and the weather in December in my native Ohio and surrounding states is usually a bitch at that time of the year. It’s not for nothing that the old saying about Ohio’s four seasons is that they include Almost Winter, Winter, Still Winter and Construction. Or that the roads in Ohio are always better in winter because the snow fills in the potholes. Where I live now, at the other end of the world, June, July and August are a lot like that...and sometimes September...and sometimes October too.

The last time I was home in Ohio for Christmas was 2005. It was not a happy time. My younger brother had just died. The best gift I got was the bottle of good whiskey my eldest nephew gave me. I finished it in under three days in my hotel room while arranging to have a headstone done for the place where my sister Darla and I scattered our brother’s ashes. But it was still nice to spend the Christmas season with my sister and her family and with my Aunt Marilyn and hers, as well as with all of the other cousins and friends that had time to meet up with me and share a drink or a meal. And their Christmas trees and gift exchanges and special Christmas meals and old traditions reminded me of all the Christmases past from my childhood and youth.

There was a time back in Buenos Aires before Virginia and I moved further south that we always had a Christmas celebration with her family and often with some of our friends as well. When I was first in Argentina, people didn’t put up trees and, in general, Santa Claus wasn’t “a thing”. More fittingly, since it was usually ninety in the shade in Buenos Aires at that time of the year, which is like late June in the States, kids got their gifts on January 6^th from the Three Wise Men, also known as the Magi, to celebrate the Feast of the Epiphany. This is the Christian holiday that commemorates the visit of the Magi to the Christ Child in Bethlehem and the physical manifestation of God to the Gentiles. 

Instead of leaving out Christmas cookies for Santa, children left out grass or hay and water for the Wise Men’s camels and their shoes instead of stockings in which to receive gifts. Gaspar, Melchior and Balthazar—most kids had a favorite among the three and Balthazar seemed to be particularly popular. Christmas itself was more a time for people to get together and feast, drink and make merry and then to go out on their terraces and balconies to toast the birth of Jesus and each other, and watch the skies over the city light up with fireworks and high-floating paper lanterns. Of course, pets all over the city were terrified and the burn and eye hospitals did a swift trade resulting from injuries sustained in the inexpert use of firecrackers and Roman candles, and the ERs always got more than their usual share of gunshot wounds from people who’d forgotten to buy fireworks discharging pistols and rifles into the summer’s night sky over the crowded city while practically everyone was sitting out on the terrace having Christmas Eve dinner al fresco because it was too hot to all be cramped up inside the houses. But it all seemed like fun at the time.

Anyway, through the Global Village process of mass communications, and what Latin American leftists have always referred to as “cultural colonialism” and what Latin American right-wingers have always referred to as “the ‘foreignization’ of national culture”, Santa Claus started coming to town in Buenos Aires and other South American capitals, looking quite hot and sweaty in his Nordic garb, and people started doing what they saw in the Hollywood movies and dubbed TV series—putting up artificial trees, stringing lights (inside rather than out), buying and displaying ornaments and often doing the gift exchange thing on the evening of the twenty-fourth, depending on the family and their economic status. But the traditions of food, drink and fellowship remained intact and local in their tastes and the northern imports always felt a little strained and out of place, if fun too..

This year, due to the COVID pandemic, I won’t he “home alone” for Christmas. Virginia won’t be able to travel to see her brother and sister and nephews and cousins and friends in Buenos Aires. It’ll be nice to have her here and we’ll probably celebrate the way we celebrate every day, grateful for where we live in the forest and everything we have. But I can’t help but feel bad for her because her older sister is aging and very ill and under the constant attention of a live-in nurse and his two assistants and I’m sure that she wishes that she could be there rather than here.

As I say, it will be good to have her here, but I’ve never been miserable like some people would be if they were left on their own at Christmas time. My Christmases for the past twenty-odd years have always included work, projects, writing and time in the woods. This year is no exception.

But they also include remembering Christmases Past. Not whole days, perhaps, but sparkling flashes.

Christmas trees were a really big deal in our family back then. My Grandpa Murel and Grandma Alice lived in a tiny house and since they always had the whole Newland Clan over for Christmas Eve, they had to economize on space. So my grandmother always had a tiny tree—more of a conifer shrub—that sat on a table under the front window, surrounded by a sparkling fake snow sheet, on which all the gifts were laid. Small though it might have been, however, the little tree was always beautifully decorated with glass and metal ornaments, candy canes, brightly colored lights and shiny silver foil “icicles”.

At Grandpa Vern and Grandma Myrt’s place, where the whole Weber family gathered for Christmas lunch on Christmas Day, there was always a very full-size tannenbaum loaded with ornaments, many of which held special significance for my grandmother—some that she’d inherited that were very old, some that we grandkids had made for her growing up, some that her four children had given her over the years and still others that had graced her Christmas trees for decades, from back in the days when her family had been growing up on tenant farms and her now grown kids had been little and helped her string beads and popcorn to flesh out the decorations. It had to be a special kind of tree. Vern insisted. He said he chose the species to make sure it “wasn’t one of those that’ll be nettling the hell out of me while I’m settin’ it up.” So no Scotch pines or Douglas firs for him. He always looked for a nice long-needled spruce or white pine. And he knew where to find them, and just about every other kind of tree, since he was the superintendent of the local cemetery and did all the landscaping himself. They were always full, perfectly conical and quite tall, topped by an antique angel whose story I never knew.

Whitie always claimed he “liked a real tree”, and was disdainful toward people who spent a fortune on expensive, flashy artificial trees. But knowing Whitie, who was about as careful with a dollar as anybody could get, I figure it was more about economy than aesthetics. Reba Mae, however, also always favored a natural tree while we kids were small and it wasn’t until we grew up and moved out that she ignored Whitie’s whining about the expense and bought herself a fake, but quite lovely tree.

If Whitie really “liked a real tree”, however, it was hard to tell it from his attitude about buying them and setting them up. The whole Christmas tree routine seemed to trigger the worst elements of his obsessive-compulsive personality. If Reba Mae bought the tree it was never up to his standards—the “damn thing” was crooked, flat on one side, full of brown needles, too short, too tall, not full enough or just plain ugly. So she started making him go along to pick them out. And that was enough to drive a person crazy because he was perfectly capable of going to wherever the Christmas tree place was on a given year and one by one go through every single tree to ensure that he was getting the most tree for his money. But even then, when he got it home, he would suddenly find that this one was also too tall, too short, too flat, too thin, off-center or whatever.

I recall vividly a year when Reba Mae’d had enough and said she thought it would be “a kind of nice sort of father and son thing” for Whitie and me to go pick out the tree together. I must have been nine or ten at the time and Whitie really didn’t have much use for me since our personalities couldn’t have been more different. So it was a time when my mother was always trying to find ways to push us closer together. But I suspect that, in this case it was because she just couldn’t face another year of Christmas-tree shopping with Whitie and found a guilt-free way of getting me to stand in.

She sprang this on my father during supper as soon as he got home from work and he grumbled that he didn’t really feel like “getting into the goddamn car again and going back uptown.”  So Reba Mae suggested maybe we could “drive over to the fairgrounds and buy one from the Boy Scouts.”

“The Boy Scouts!” Whitie cried, as if my mother had suggested buying a tree from a terrorist organization. “They’re always higher than hell!”

So Dad and I climbed into his ’52 Chevy and drove uptown to the grocery store of his friend and fellow local merchant Elwood Chesbrough. It was a nice grocery store on the far east end of the main drag over the B&O Railroad tracks. This year Mr. Chesbrough had a truckload of pines leaning against the building outside. Winter days are short in Ohio and it was already dark out, but Mr. Chesbrough had the outside lights on and there was a streetlamp that illuminated the side of the building. “See there, Danny,” Whitie said. “Boy Scouts my ass, Elwood’s got some real nice trees here.”

We went in and Whitie and Elwood shot the breeze for almost half an hour, before Mr. Chesbrough finally said, “So what can I do ya for, Whitie?” and my father told him we wanted a Christmas tree. “Take your pick!” he said. And out we went.

It was bitter cold out, and now there were snow flurries in the air. I right away looked at the first tree in line and said, “This is a nice one!” To which Whitie said, “Nice?  Damn thing looks like it died of blight.”

“How ‘bout this one?” I said, grabbing a needly bough and giving it a squeeze. But Whitie was ignoring me since my first choice had demonstrated me to be lacking in Christmas tree criteria. So for the next forty minutes or so, I mostly looked up at the streetlamp to watch the flurries drift down and jigged around to try and keep from freezing while Whitie meticulously went through every tree against the wall, standing each up and inspecting it from all sides, then discarding it before moving on to the next one until he’d been through them all and then going back to some that he’d discarded before. Eventually, Mr. Chesbrough came out and said, “So’d ya find one?”

“Hell, Elwood, I dunno. How’s this one?”

“Why don’t we ask the expert?” Mr. Chesbrough said.

“Huh?”

“Your boy.”

“Danny?”

The grocery store owner looked at him like, “Hell, I don’t know. Is that his name?”

“It’s really pretty, Dad!” I said making myself sound enthused so we could get out of there before frostbite set in.

“What do you think, Elwood?”

“I’m with the boy, Whitie. Best tree out here.”

So after a bit of wrangling over the price, Whitie finally shelled out and we were off for home with our beautiful pine.

Of course, when he and my mother got it screwed into the tree-stand...it was too tall, flat on one side, sitting skewed, etc., etc., etc...

But one of the Ohio Christmases I remember best was the year I turned eighteen and my sister Darla was home for Christmas break from college and she and I did our Christmas shopping together. Once we’d finished, we went together to what was a great bar back then in our small Ohio town of Wapakoneta, a watering-hole called Meinerding’s. The place with the wonderful name was only open for twelve years but in that time it and its owner, Ralph Meinerding, developed an almost legendary reputation. In a town where the bars tended to be male, Ralph’s place attracted the middle-aged to younger set of both sexes and combined cheap draft with delicious bar food.

Ralph himself was a small, gentle guy who usually had the stub of a cigar chomped in his jaw. A good family man who was known to like gardening, wood-working, making intricate doll-houses and a good game of euchre or sheephead if he could find one, Ralph was always kind and friendly. But he kept a bruiser of a Viking-looking heavyweight called Sam Fullenkamp on hand as his bartender and part-time (whenever needed) bouncer and if Meinerding’s was a nice, friendly, fun kind of a bar, Sam made sure it stayed that way.

Although his gargantuan deep-fried pork tenderloin sandwiches were the cuisine de rigueur that Ralph was best known for, he had the art of deep-frying just about anything down pat. In a facetious piece a long time ago, I once joked that “Ralph was the king of fry...Ralph fried mushrooms and fried onions and fried beefsteak potatoes and just about anything else you could fry. Hell, if a fight broke out and the bouncer, Sam Fullencamp, knocked somebody's ear off the side of their head, you had to get it off the counter quick before Ralph breaded it an tossed it into the fryer.”  But the truth is, you would have had to go a long way to find bar food as good as Meinerding’s.

So anyway, although I had misspent huge blocks of my junior high and high school days in a billiard and card saloon called The Brunswick, which was also a famous Wapakoneta institution, that Christmas shopping evening with my sister was the first time I’d ever set foot in Meinerding’s—though my sister and her friends knew it well. That’s one of the Christmases I remember best from my adolescence, because sitting there with my sister, no longer Big Sis and Little Brother, but two almost adult friends, enjoying a draft beer and a bite together a few days before Christmas, there was a kind of realization that this was the first night of the rest of my life and that there lay a youthful future before me to do with what I might. And because that awareness was so powerful, I still have the warm, friendly fragrance of that barroom in my head. I can still taste the ice cold beer with its slightly bitter froth, a taste I’ve tried to recreate in every one of the thousands of beers I’ve guzzled since, but to no avail. Because it wasn’t the flavor of the beer but the flavor of life that I was drinking in. It was a moment of almost perfect happiness.

And so, although I may no longer decorate a Christmas tree, my head and heart are yet still full of the light and joy of the Christmas season, because it’s a time of year that also helps me take stock and realize just how good life has been to me, if for no other reason because I discovered early on that light and joy are precisely what not only Christmas, but also life itself, are all about.

May the Christmas and New Year season bring all of you a sense of joy and gratitude as well, and may this be the first day of one of the best times in your life.

Merry Christmas and happy New Year to you all!    

 

 

 

 

 

 

DICKENS—A GHOST FROM CHRISTMAS PAST WITH A MESSAGE FOR CHRISTMAS PRESENT

Charles Dickens in his studio.

I’m sure I’ve mentioned here before that my favorite Christmas story is A Christmas Carol, a novella by the immortal nineteenth-century British novelist, Charles Dickens. As just about anyone in the English-speaking world will know—after successive generations have created multiple movie and cartoon versions of the work—it’s the story of a miser, whom Dickens ingeniously named Ebenezer Scrooge (a surname the pronunciation of which puckers the face into a grimace of negativity), who spends a very special Christmas Eve wrestling with his inner demons and awakes on Christmas Day a brand new and infinitely better man. He is forcibly aided in that task by four ghosts, who come to him in four separate visitations: that of his former partner and fellow miser, Jacob Marley, who warns Scrooge to save his mortal soul and not do what he, Marley, did with his life (unless he wants to be saddled with the same fate, to be lost in limbo); the ghost of Christmas past, who reminds him of his youth and the generosity and love he was shown by others; the ghost of Christmas present, who takes him on a mortifying tour of his current misdeeds and their consequences; and the ghost of Christmas yet to come, who makes him face his vile, pathetic legacy if he fails to change his ways.

First Edition - A Christmas Carol

By way of background, Dickens wrote this novella when he was thirty-one and did so in just six weeks with the publisher breathing down his neck. I tend to think of Dickens as being among the first “bloggers”, since, by this time, he was already quite well-known for the works he put out weekly in serialized form through periodicals, the most famous of these being the hilarious and eminently human Pickwick Papers—a work that made him a renowned writer by the time he was twenty-four. This was an innovative form of publishing that he would practice throughout his life.

But A Christmas Carol was a new departure, since it was the first work of his that was published in book form, and it met with immediate commercial success (for the publisher) coming out on December 19, and with the entire first press run having sold out by Christmas Eve. By Christmas the following year, the book was in its thirteenth printing. Some of these printings were clandestine and the author ended up being cut out of the commercial chain. Dickens sued, but the publisher went bankrupt and the writer ended up with only meager profits from the publication of what was surely one of his most popular works. He eventually recovered some of these losses, however, by making histrionic readings of the novella the centerpiece of well over a hundred of his highly popular and lucrative speaking tours. Unlike many writers who are infinitely better on paper than in person, Dickens was a powerful public speaker and an outstanding actor, which rendered the events of these tours exceedingly well-attended and often, especially in the author’s later life, well paid.   

Still today, A Christmas Carol must surely hold some records for popularity of a literary work. Since its first printing in 1843, it has never been out of print and has seen multiple adaptations for stage, screen, musicals, animation, etc.

The mean-spirited characters, like Scrooge, whom Dickens wrote about are often put down by critics to the melodrama and black and white characterizations that were so often a part of literature in the Victorian Era. But Dickens’s characters were not, in fact, black and white and even the worst of them often demonstrated glimmers of humanity or fleetingly redeeming qualities, despite their general and inevitable cruelty and avarice. Scrooge, however, crosses over entirely to portray a principle in which Dickens apparently believed strongly: the redeemability of the human spirit.

One of John Leech's color illustrations 

from the first edition, when Marley's

ghost comes to call.

The fact that Scrooge has to be “scared straight” and be threatened with the most abysmal of fates to come around to “the spirit of Christmas”—which, in the end, clearly makes his redemption yet another egotistical gesture—seems immaterial to the author. He resorts to spirits from the great beyond in order to recover Scrooge’s soul for the common good by hook or by crook, and does so without apology, since it was very likely what he would have wanted to have the power to do—active social reformer that he was—in real life, where he had observed such widespread inhumanity.

And, melodrama or no, Dickens came by his vision of public authority and private “charity” honestly. Born into a respectable if not exactly wealthy family, Dickens would witness how his father, John Dickens, frittered the family’s finances away and fell into abject debt and destitution. By the time young Charles was twelve, his father had been sentenced to debtors’ prison. The Dickens family lost everything to their creditors and Charles was forced to leave school, sell his books and take a job in a boot blacking factory, a typically filthy, unhealthy industrial operation of those times, in which child labor (which was practically child slavery) was the norm. The experience was to leave Dickens with what one biographer referred to as a “deep personal social outrage,” while providing the world with what was to be some of the greatest literature ever known. His treatment at the hands of some of the many child exploiters of those times gave Dickens a unique insight into social injustice and provided him with much of the grist for his writer’s mill.

An illustration by Fred Bernard of Dickens as 

a boy working in the boot blacking factory, 

from the 1892 edition of John Foster's 

"Life of Charles Dickens".

Oddly enough, A Christmas Carol is a highly secular tale. It doesn’t harken back to the story of the Nativity or preach from a biblical pulpit. But it surely encompasses every main principle of true Christianity—universal love, generosity, selfless charity, forgiveness, understanding, redemption, etc., etc.—in a way that envelops the reader’s heart and, hopefully, shames us for our own miserly ways and lack of social conscience.

This is why I come back to Dickens and A Christmas Carol every year at this time, because it has never quit being a universal story. Indeed, now more than ever in contemporary history, we are facing a world at least as cruel as the one Dickens portrays, and seem to have learned nothing in the last century and a half. Millions still live in slavery, employee exploitation is rampant, once strong organized labor is on its knees (thanks to government-corporate collusion), and every effort is being made to sweep the poor under the rug, rob them of their benefits and leave them for dead. Never has there been greater accumulation of wealth at the top, while tens of millions of refugees have nowhere to go, people go hungry and live on the street in some of the most “advanced” economies on earth, the planet is being poisoned at an alarming rate, and people are today more hatefully divided along political, religious and social lines than at any other time in recent memory, and to an extent that belies unquestionable advancements made in the twentieth-century post-World War II era.

Oddly enough, fundamental Christianity is enjoying a rebirth. But what exactly does that mean? Simple lip service to some religious dogma? Has it been redefined to ignore the basic teachings of its founder and namesake? And what does the greeting “Merry Christmas” really signify, unless it’s accompanied by a Dickensian transformation like the one that Ebenezer Scrooge underwent?

Fundamentalist Christians consistently advocate “getting Christ back into Christmas.” But what does that signify? Whether you are a “believer” or not, the original teachings of Christianity—and of the other monotheist religions as well—provide a perfect guideline for secular life.

Every single doctrine of the major religions—Judaism, its offspring Christianity and Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and so on—contains some form of the one basic rule on which all the rest of their doctrines hinge: The Golden Rule. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. And that’s the not-so-hidden message as well of A Christmas Carol. Scrooge could only see the error of his ways when he was shown the mirror image of his soul, and saw the face of cruelty, selfishness, disdain and indifference reflected back at him.

In the spirit of Christmas, it’s an exercise we would all do well to emulate, whether or not we have spirits from beyond to help us in our task, and something we should demand, as well, of the leaders we choose to follow in all walks of life.

I sincerely wish you all a Merry Christmas and a year of love, peace and healing ahead. 

       

PEACE ON EARTH, A HUNDRED YEARS AGO TODAY

One of the most inspiring factual Christmas stories in modern history is, perhaps, that of the Christmas Truce of 1914. I know that it has been told many times before by journalists, novelists, screenwriters and others, but I feel that, as a parable, it bears repeating, more because of the implications of its meaning than as a mere anecdote, although it remains a singularly moving and colorful story as such. And if there was ever a holiday season in which it deserved re-telling, it is surely this Christmas, on the one hundredth anniversary of this extraordinary event.

World War I, known back then as the Great War, was one of the most intimately horrific wars in history. Still fought in extremely close quarters and, at the peak of battle, still a war about hand to hand combat and grim, bloody, “justified” murder, it was also the first war that introduced the technology to permit even more effective mass slaughter: tanks capable of breaking through firing lines and overrunning barriers and men, machineguns that could fire between 400 and 600 rounds a minute and out-match a hundred riflemen, mustard and chlorine gasses that choked the air and blinded, suffocated and incapacitated soldiers on the opposite side...in short, the things nightmares are made of, and all up close and personal.

Losses in the Great War were tragic and, for their generation, devastating. By the end of the conflict ten million combatants on both sides had died and another six million civilians had perished with them. Tens of millions of others would be wounded, mutilated or incapacitated for life.

This new technology necessitated keeping a low profile during battle, which, in turn, meant getting below ground level. It was because of this that World War I became, essentially, a trench war—to such an extent that, by the end of the war, the trenches built by both sides, laid end to end, could have easily stretched once around the circumference of the earth.  Trenches were usually built in threes and roughly parallel to each other on either side. The front-line trench was typically fifty yards from the enemy and was backed up by support trenches a couple of hundred yards back and a reserve trench several hundred yards farther back still, holding relief troops and equipment. They were purposely serpentine, snaking their way through the countryside in order to discourage direct frontal attack and to provide different angles from which to fire on the enemy. In between, no-man’s-land, a bleak strip of shell-cratered land strewn with barbed wire and other obstacles and surveilled by machine-gunners on either side.  

But the intimate nature of this arrangement meant that the men hunkered down in those trenches for weeks and months on end became “neighbors” with those who populated the enemy trenches across from theirs. And clearly, like nearly all other wars, the Great War wasn’t about any enmity among the individuals involved in the fighting, but about politicians doing the bidding of ambitious imperial leaders who set their sights on each other’s holdings and used propaganda to dupe common citizens into believing that it was their patriotic duty to fight and die for “king and country” and for a set of imposed “ideals” that served to invent “an enemy people” who only yesterday had been a neighbor, a fellow European, a brother or a sister.

It is worth recalling, nevertheless, that this was a time in which common individuals were starting to come into their own. It was the time of growing anarchism and Marxism, of movements toward increasing democratization, of unions and guilds to protect the rights of those whose toil and skills were augmenting the wealth of the powerful on both sides who were conducting this war for reasons of their own while adducing matters of patriotism and the glory of “just war”.

As such, there was no little concern among leaders on both sides regarding the “morale” of the troops in the trenches. And indeed those concerns, for anyone hoping to conduct a prolonged and widespread conflict in such conditions, were warranted. Nearly a half-year into the war, the two sides had reached a deadlock after British and French troops blocked initial advances by the soldiers of Kaiser Wilhelm. This was where the grueling trench war intensified, but ended up often being a waiting game in which no one could advance and no one could retreat and everyone had to become accustomed to periods of sitting out their days in cold, wet, filthy earthworks, randomly broken by the adrenalin of firefights or over-the-top hand-to-hand battles.

Odd though it may seem, by the latter months of 1914, verbal contact and even a certain amount of fraternization wasn’t unheard-of between opposing trenches, particularly between German and British troops, though there were occasionally such cases reported between the French and the Germans as well, to such an extent that a young French officer named Charles de Gaulle is said to have termed “lamentable” the attitude of a number of his troops who would have been perfectly content to let the enemy be. Incredibly enough, informal ceasefires were sometimes called just before nightfall to allow one side or the other to receive food or other supplies. And there were even reports of “visits” during lulls in the fighting by members of one army to the opposing army’s trenches, in a sort of courtesy-call etiquette respected by riflemen on both sides of the war.

As this sort of thing progressed, superior officers began being alarmed by reports of the practice and started sending down rigorous orders forbidding troops from any sort of fraternizing with the enemy. But that didn’t stop what amounted to a Christmas miracle’s taking place over the course of several days from Christmas Eve through Boxing Day (December 26^th), 1914.

It all began with some of the German soldiers placing reminders of the Christian holiday up on the edges of their trenches—a candle here, a makeshift Tannenbaum there, and suddenly the rims of their excavations were beginning to look a lot like Christmas. It’s easy to speculate that some of the troops in the opposite trenches might have suspected a trick to get them to break cover. But then, the Germans began singing Christmas carols in their language. And soon, the British soldiers started answering them in English. Someone shouted, “Frohe Weihnachten!” And someone shouted back, “Merry Christmas!”

Finally, a few brave souls climbed up out of their trenches, negotiated the barbed wire and obstacles and met each other halfway in no-man’s-land, which was now converted into Every Man’s Land. Others came. They shook hands, smiled, shared and exchanged what they had—cigarettes, cigars, pipe tobacco, whatever liquor they had in their flasks, chocolate, small deserts from their battlefield rations. And they traded souvenirs, buttons from their coats, caps, scarves, whatever might serve as a gift.

They took advantage of these rare moments of peace and shared Christmas sentiments to gather and bury the bodies of their most recent dead and they held joint Christmas services to honor the day. Even the artillery fell silent as soldiers from both sides of the rolls of concertina wire greeted each other, not as enemies, but as fellow human beings and as brothers with this same tradition, with families, and with memories of previous years of peace in common.

A reflection of how touching these moments were, is the account of one British trooper who wrote, “I wouldn't have missed that unique and weird Christmas Day for anything. I spotted a German officer, some sort of lieutenant I should think, and being a bit of a collector, I intimated to him that I had taken a fancy to some of his buttons...I brought out my wire clippers and, with a few deft snips, removed a couple of his buttons and put them in my pocket. I then gave him two of mine in exchange....I saw one of my machine gunners, who was a bit of an amateur hairdresser in civil life, cutting the unnaturally long hair of a docile Boche, who was patiently kneeling on the ground whilst the automatic clippers crept up the back of his neck.”

In the end, literally tens of thousands of opposing troops took part in the informal Christmas Truce of 1914, before their superior officers desperately imposed drastic measures to put an immediate stop to such an appalling display of...brotherhood. For a moment, men pushed into battle with other men just like them for unquestionable reasons neither understood and on the basis of fabricated logic and false justifications invented by their handlers, took their lives and their wills back and, responding to the higher orders of their own shared religious and social traditions, decided for a few days to no longer be enemies.

Imbued as they were with as much civic as religious doctrine, however, the brief silencing of the guns to celebrate Christmas would inevitably end, since they were, unfortunately, already past being free enough to believe in the power of one, by which individuals of like mind retain the power and the human duty to say “no” to their self-imposed authorities. Their upbringing, their schooled sense of patriotism, their feelings of contrived loyalty to anyone but their fellow man, led them back into war, and before they were through, millions more would die.

For a few days in December of 1914, however, the power of the Christmas spirit outweighed the power of warring empires and erstwhile enemies gave each other the gift of peace in the name of a common and loving human tradition.

MERRY CHRISTMAS TO ALL AND PEACE ON EARTH!

THAT PERFECT CHRISTMAS

I’ve been told I have a good memory. Actually, I’d qualify that statement and say I have a good memory for stories from the distant past. I’m hopeless at memorizing poetry, lyrics, passages from books, quotes, etc.—a dangerous thing for a newsman and non-fiction writer, which is why I’ve always had to take abundant notes and frequently look things up to check facts.

But I even amaze myself, sometimes, at how I can trigger a memory from twenty, thirty, forty, fifty or more years ago, and it will come back to me, not as a story, but as a special brand of video clip, a sort of dream-clip, if you will, in which not only the images are there, but also the sounds, smells and the exact feelings and mindset with which I experienced those scenes at the time. In fact, I can actually “time-travel” to that era, and experience those past times exactly as they were, or at least as they were for me, before the world changed and became the new state of mind that it is today. (I sometimes wonder if this isn’t precisely how the elderly eventually get trapped in their own past, in a sometimes blissful, sometimes anxious state, much like a dream that can suddenly turn nightmare, and that others describe as “dementia”, when observed from the outside).

Actually, I can remember certain scenes vividly as far back as when I was three or a little before. That’s why yesterday, on Christmas Eve, as I was trying to recall the first Christmas that sticks in my mind, I was at first a little surprised to find that it wasn’t until I was five that this holiday, so special to Christian-reared children, managed to make a lasting impression on me. But after I gave it some thought, I realized why: Because it was, quite simply, a uniquely perfect Christmas.

Back then, “The Christmas Season” began for me in November, when, Sagittarian-winter-child that I was, I already started longing for snow, and driving my mother crazy asking her, every time the thermometer dipped to near freezing “if she thought it would snow...No? But it could, right? I mean, it could, couldn’t it, please, please, please, couldn’t it?” Thanksgiving, my birthday in early December, and Christmas proper all blended together in one joyous season that I wished would never end.

The first thing to whet my seasonal appetite were the Christmas catalogs from major mail order houses like Penney’s, Sears, Spiegel and others that would start arriving  in November and that were filled with pictures of toys and ornaments and lots of other things to spark the fantasies of a five-year-old. I pored over them, filling my greedy eyes and mind, and wanted everything! I couldn’t understand why, if  Santa Claus was a god-like elf who could do god-like things, like flying all around the world making deliveries to every good little boy and girl in a single night, he was incapable of bringing me precisely what I was wishing for. But my mother made it abundantly clear that Santa wasn’t made of money and had millions of kids like me to please around the world and that it was a terrible thing to be an ingrate. I had to be grateful for whatever Saint Nick brought. Besides, I should be thinking more about the birth of the Baby Jesus than about what I was getting for Christmas. It was His birthday, not mine.


But then again, it was pretty darn close to my birthday, now, wasn’t it, coming only a couple of weeks afterward? So the Little Lord Jesus and I kind of shared a season. As if to celebrate that fact, this particular year my Grandma Myrt made a special request to DJ Cliff Willis at the local AM radio station in Lima, Ohio. My mother sat me right next to the radio in the kitchen, with a cup of hot cocoa with marshmallows melting on its creamy surface, so I would be there to hear when Cliff said: “Mrs. Myrtle Weber of Wapakoneta has asked us to play a special request for her grandson, Danny, who is five years old today. And here it is, ‘Christmas Dragnet’.” For some reason, I loved that story (recorded for Capitol Records on a script by comic genius Stan Freberg), which was a spoof on a noir genre TV detective show starring Jack Web and Harry Morgan, in which the strait-lace Joe Friday is investigating a guy called “Grudge” who doesn’t believe in Santa Claus (nor, he says, does he believe in Columbus, Cleveland, Cincinnati, or the Easter Bunny... “What about Toledo?” he’s asked. “Toledo...uuuh...I still haven’t made up my mind about Toledo”).

Needless to say, I was amazed at my grandmother’s clout. She had actually made the radio talk to me. 

This particular year, however, I was indeed reminded of the birth of the Christ Child, because we had a birth of our own. Just a month earlier, in mid-November, my brand new brother was born. Dad, who was nicknamed “Whitie” because of his blond hair, wanted to call him Rusty, because he was born with a shock of bright red fuss on his head. (Luckily, Reba Mae talked him out of that because when “Rusty’s” baby hair fell out, what came in to replace it was even blonder than Whitie’s). Now, you’d have thought that having an eccentric name like Reba Mae herself, my mother would have been less whimsical in naming us. But no. Her preference over Whitie’s “Rusty” was “Dennis James”. Why? Because she thought Dennis James, the sports announcer and later game show host, who at the time was the face of Old Gold cigarettes on TV, looked “like such a nice fellow.” My sister, Darla, she had named after Darla Hood, the child actress from the Our Gang children’s comedy movies. And me she called Danny, because she had always loved the song, “Danny Boy”. So Dennis James it was (regardless of the fact that the original Dennis James was actually born Demie James Sposa). And since Denny and Danny sounded so much alike, the poor kid would go through childhood with an “indoor” name and an “outdoor” name—Jim or Jimmy at home and Dennis at school.

A special gift that year, Jimmy!

Anyway, I was thrilled with this novelty. I mean, I’d have time later to tease the poor little guy to exasperation and to fight with him all the time when we got a bit older, as brothers are wont to do. But this year, this perfect Christmas, he seemed like another gift for me, a little brother all my own. He seemed to be a part of the Christmas miracle. My mother had gone away for a few days, and while she was out, picked me up a kid brother.

So, this year, when she sat us down on the couch to read us The Night before Christmas, Darla was sitting on the floor facing Reba Mae, I was sitting on the couch on one side of her, and little brother Jimmy was lying bundled up on a blanket on the other side of her sucking on a pacifier. My sister and I knew this poem from other years and knew when the funny parts were coming—especially our favorite one. I wanted to tell my new brother, “Listen, Jimmy, listen, here it comes!” And then Reba Mae read it: “...Away to the window I flew like a flash / Tore open the shutters / And threw up the sash!” At which point Darla and I made gagging, puking sounds and were swept away in gales of giggling at how clever we were. Threw up the sash! How funny was that? Jimmy, for his part, was unimpressed, oblivious in fact, except for a pruney frown that crinkled his ruddy little brow, at all the noise we were making when he was so obviously trying to catch forty winks.

Fredric March as Scrooge

We were one of the first families in town to have a TV set, and it was a magical world that it offered at Christmas time. This was the year of the première television production of the classic Charles Dickens story, A Christmas Carol, with Fredric March playing Scrooge and Basil Rathbone playing the ghost of his late business partner, Jacob Marley, who comes back to haunt Scrooge and convince him to change his ways or face the eternity of the damned, as he has had to do. With the special effects of today, kids now would probably find that old black and white film quaint if not downright laughable, but we were enthralled, and every bit as terrified as March’s Scrooge at the prospect of spending Christmas Eve in the company of four frightening specters. And then too, there was the tragicomic humor of comedian Red Skelton in his Christmas special, in which Freddy the Freeloader (the first homeless character to star in a nationwide broadcast), in a take-off on an O. Henry short story, is trying to find a warm place to spend a lonely Christmas Eve. He decides jail is his best bet, but “in the holiday spirit”, can’t find a single cop who’ll arrest him. (The sketch has a “happy ending” though: Freddy gets ninety days for vagrancy and thus has a “warm room” and three squares a day until spring). And also, the Perry Como Christmas Special, starring that famous crooner who was so relaxed you kind of wondered how he didn’t doze off and fall from the high stool he sat on to sing.

Red Skelton as Freddy the Freeloader

Christmas Eve dinner was at my Grandma and Grandpa Newland’s, cattycorner across the street from us, where we got together with all of our cousins, aunts and uncles on the Newland side. And Christmas Day lunch was at my Grandma and Grandpa Weber’s on the other side of town with the myriad members of the clan on that side of the family. Two very different affairs, but both veritable feasts with every kind of homemade dish and dessert imaginable, plus traditional cookies and candies: festive frosted sugar cookies, chocolate, vanilla and peanut butter fudge, snow-white-creamy-sugary-to-die-from divinity...

But in between there was the delight of Christmas morning and seeing what wonderful packages Santa had left under the tree for us, and it was so hard to wait until Whitie and Reba Mae decided it was time to get up—especially after their fitful night of resting in accordance with Jimmy’s feeding times.

This year, however, 1954, was, as I say, particularly special. Whitie seemed to know it too that year. With a newborn baby, Reba Mae wouldn’t be going to Candlelight Service at the First Methodist Church this year, but Whitie decided to go anyway, when the Christmas Eve family festivities were over. And although it was way past my bedtime, I decided to tag along with him and Darla. The old church across from the courthouse was dazzling inside. It was the first time I had ever seen it at night and it was decked out in boughs of cedar, ribbons and a multitude of candles. Everyone was full of season’s cheer including the minister. The choir sang “Oh Holy Night” and when they got to the climactic line that goes, “Fall on your knees / Oh hear the angel voices...” I could feel myself break out in gooseflesh.

Later, while—as Whitie used to say—“the preacher missed a few good places to stop,” I dozed off leaning against my dad’s arm, which he put around me when he realized I’d conked out. It was a comfort to be there, safe in the church on Christmas Eve, with the power of lots of people all thinking good thoughts, my father’s arm around me, the scent of his pinstriped wool suit, mixing with his cologne and the sweet bite of the filterless cigarettes he smoked. It was safe, warm, like the best place in the world I could possibly be. I was, quite literally, “in a good place.”

The next year would be different. Whitie would have the first in a series of nervous breakdowns that extended over the course of three decades. His chronic manic depression would virtually become a sixth member of our family and would change his life and ours forever. For now, however, Christmas, Eve, 1954, I was happier than I’d ever been, trusted and believed in, well, everything, and couldn’t have asked for anything more.