That Was Naughty, This Is Nice

Some years back I was recording some music for Christmas, which would be held at my brother’s house in Virginia and got knocked in the heart without warning when I clicked on Susser die Glocken nie Klingen. From the first notes I began to tear up. I think that my mother must have been playing these songs when I was in the womb (I was born in Germany). I never really learned the words, but could easily translate them if I wanted to. Here I am a black American woman crying at my computer over German Christmas songs. I have not been back to Germany since I was born, but the culture is so hardwired into my system that things German really get to me.

Christmas began with the first Sunday of Advent. Mom would pull out a little brass-plated Advent candle chime that I always thought was German, but turned out to be of Swedish origin. It has four candles and above them a merri-go-round type of contraption with angels and chimes hanging from it dangling from it. Inside the angels and chimes are bells attached to a center pole. The heat from the candles starts the angels dancing and the dangling chimes strike the bells as they spin around. It is rumored that this tradition was once only practiced by Swedish royalty. We also had one advent calendar each. Early on we had the beautiful paper kind with the lovely illustrations, then we started getting ones with chocolate for many years, even when I was in college I had one.

My Tante Adela and Onkel Gustav would send a big package every year with marzipan, stöllen, this marvelous bittersweet chocolate bottles filled with liquer. My mother made Christmas plates and we’d get lebkucken and pfeffernusse, basically gingerbread cookies with a white sugar glaze of which you were obliged to eat at least one, and spekaltius cookies in the shape of windmills. There would also be cards from everyone in Germany, which my mother would include with all the others on the archway between the living and dining rooms (a couple years we got some from inmates who were incarcerated where my father worked—as a correction’s officer; my mother hung those up with all the rest of them)

When the tree went up (after my mother and father went out and got it in the bitter cold from the tree farm), mom would pull out the ornaments. We had ones that had been given to us, ones my brother and I bought or made, but my favorites were always the ones my mother and father brought from Germany, ones they had bought during their very first Christmas. They are delicate glass ornaments, some abstract, others with a snowman or boy in ski cap. We had a tall star finial, like something at the top of the Chrysler Building to top the tree. My dad would, after much fussing string on the lights, then we would put on the ornaments and icicles. Usually, my mother had put on the Christmas music. Harry Belafonte, Nat King Cole, Ella Fitzgerald and German Christmas songs—Es ist ein ros’ entsprungen, Stille Nach, O Tannenbaum, Alle Jahre Wieder, O du frohliche, Kling Glockchen, Susser der Glocken nie klingen.

On the table with our Christmas plates, or in the living room next to the advent candles was always a bowl, a beautiful one carved from a tree trunk with the bark on the outside of the bowl, with nuts—hazel, Brazil, almonds, walnuts, pecans, and a coconut in it. This was my father’s contribution. When he was a boy growing up in Alabama, he got oranges, apples, nuts and one or two gifts. Oranges were a big treat, even though he grew up one state up from Florida. So were any nuts that weren’t peanuts, or anything you couldn’t find in Alabama. So if a hazelnut or Brazil nut made its way into his hands, he was thrilled. He really appreciated the variety. My brother and I used to actually crack the nuts and eat them. I never understood the significance of the coconut; I think dad just liked the coconut for his own reasons and thought it should be included.

On Christmas Eve night we’d have gumbo for dinner (nod to dad’s Southern roots). My brother didn’t like it so Mom made him something else—but gumbo became an annual tradition. Then we’d go to church for Christmas Eve mass. That was always wonderful—the old Sacred Heart Church filled with incense. The altar covered with Christmas flowers. The priest in his gold and white robes. The church stuffed to the gills with the regulars and visiting families and the Christmas and Easter Catholics. The mass always opened with O Come All Ye Faithful. Even years later when I sang with St. Patrick’s Cathedral choir we’d start the mass with that great song. There was a lot of baby squalling, fidgeting, sniffling, coughing, whispering, reprimanding, giggling, snoring, dozing—there was life in that church. And everything always got quiet when our priest got to the point when Christ was born. The mass was extra long because twice as many people as usual had to go up to communion. You waved to the people you knew and nodded and smiled at the people you didn’t. After mass there’d be a running commentary about Mrs. So and So’s get up, or Mr. So and So’s annoying habit of stopping you in the doorway of the church to be nosy, and blocking all exiting traffic in the process.

Home to Christmas plates and eggnog, but before that, mom got out the Bible, and one of us, usually me because I was the oldest, had to read from the gospels. I think this happened more when we were younger. After the reading, we were allowed to open one, maybe two gifts, in a concession to my mother’s German childhood, when they opened all of the gifts on Christmas Eve.

This was when we were past the age of believing in Santa Claus, and my parents put the gifts out while we were still up and about. Before then we went to bed and they sneaked the presents out. Although I maintain to this day that I figured out that Santa was a fiction when I was four years old and figured out that the loot my mother was bringing out of Sears in plain brown bags and putting into the trunks, the same loot she hauled upstairs, was loot that eventually would be mine. I don’t know how I guessed it, probably the proximity to Christmas and the strangeness of bags and bags of stuff coming out of a place that I knew sold toys. Or I think I might have caught my mom at wrapping. Anyway, Mom tried to explain it away by saying that Santa couldn’t wrap all the presents and needed help from mommies and daddies. I didn’t buy it. My brother, on the other hand, believed in Santa for a normal period of time (although he is still bitter about the fact that I have a photo of me on Santa’s lap and he doesn’t. It isn’t as if my parents didn’t care—he was just terrified and wouldn’t go to Santa). Once Kenny understood the concept of Parents = Santa he did some snooping of his own, uncovering a Lionel train set less than 48 hours before Christmas and getting into loads of trouble for ruining the surprise.

Morning was either a happy 6 am surprise, or a bit later when we got older, but not that much. It’s fair to say that my mother has always been a very early riser, so she was sometimes up before we were, putting on coffee and excited for us to open our gifts. There would be nut bread and cranberry bread and stöllen, hard boiled eggs and lunch meats, mostly wursts and Westphalian ham, Swiss cheese, butter. When we were very little, gifts got opened first. But when we got older, we ate first, opened gifts afterward.

Ken and I would go at it pretty steadily with mom behind us, and dad hanging way back. He was always sort of shy about opening gifts for some reason. I think, no matter how far in life he got, he always appreciated the abundance, and never took it for granted. That reminds me of stories my mom told me about winter’s during the war (WWII). I don’t remember if it was around Christmas or not, but she told me that wool was scarce, so they carefully unraveled old sweaters, wet it, rewound it, and knit the wool into new items, including socks. Leather shoes were an impossibility, so her grandfather made her wooden shoes and she wore them with the heavy wool socks. She said her feet to this day have never been warmer. It seems to me those reknit items were given as Christmas gifts.

I have a million great memories of Christmas. There was one in particular that makes me smile to this day. It was the Christmas we gave mom an exact replica of a doll she had for many years, that was broken by a little boy, when she was in her early Twenties (and just married to dad, I think). We went through all sorts of machinations to get that doll—I ordered it, dad paid me, we had it sent to our neighbors, the doll took forever to come. But it came. And when Mom opened it up on Christmas Day, she burst into tears, she was so happy.

This is all so corny and there are those out there who might think that I've sugar coated things somewhat here but it's all true.

As you can see my Santa-dotes are not a true reflection of how I feel about the holidays. I love them. Not for all the commercialism of them, but because coming to the end of the year, to the winter solstice, to a time of solitary thought (for a lovely contemplation please read my friend Saara Dutton's thoughts here. can be a time of private joy, a cleansing of the soul palate for the fresh new year.

If you are not all sugared out a couple of well-worn scenes that always make me smile. And please share your thoughts if you'd like.