A Sideboard Always Full

When I turned to page 64 I literally yelped.

I call them my "Christmas porn," the magazines I buy over the holidays just to look at the lush, colorful decorations. Each of the seasons have their colors, but I love the festive hues and the sparkle of Christmas most of all. I usually skip the "Better Homes & Gardens" type periodicals and go in for the glam: a lot for the British magazines, but also things like the "cottage journals." The particular magazine I was looking through was "Holiday Home," filled with marvelous expensive things I could never afford in a lifetime (many which I wouldn't want anyway), lush homes, and even more plush furnishings.

And then I saw this, and it all came flooding back.

My grandfather's (Dad's father) house was built in 1920, when Dad was seven years old, so it was middle-aged when I first knew it and venerable the last time I saw it ten years ago, a Dutch Colonial with a steeply pitched roof to each side interrupted by long gables. It underwent very little redecorating over the years; oh, some wallpaper vanished and the candle wall sconces with it, and somewhere along the line the original kitchen cabinets were replaced with trendy 50s metal ones. The sole bathroom in the house had the original fixtures: black-and-white floor tiles, X-shaped white ceramic faucet handles, a showerless tub. The hardwood floors were scuffed and bowed; the wallpaper up to the second story grimy where numerous hands had reached for assistance on the walls; the stair treads hollowed from footfalls. But it never mattered to me because it was a place where the past intersected with the present, an effect I wrote about in "The Magic House." It was never more so evident on Christmas, when the tree was hung with vintage clear ornaments from World War II, bubble lights, "big bulbs," and waterfalls of tinsel, but even on ordinary days the passage to the past was a very thin veil through which I hungrily peered, trying to make my way to that other side.

So when I turned the page and saw the selfsame sideboard that sat in Grandpa's cellar, covered with a large grey Nativity set, you can imagine how my memories went spiraling back. I have deliberately mirror imaged the illustration to show you the sideboard just the way it would have looked when we entered the house through the outside cellar door, on the left against the wall. It was the first thing you saw when you entered, and at Christmas it was a thing of glory, covered with a big potted poinsettia cradled in red or green foil wrap, flanked on either side by platters of the Italian cookies my Auntie Margaret had been baking for hours: round brown-purple wine biscuits, biscotti-shaped pale almond bars and chocolate-colored molasses cookies, and round golden butterballs rolled in confectioners' sugar (a.k.a. Danish wedding cookies or Mexican wedding cookies). Scattered among the cookies would be tiny boxed individual torrone (Italian nougat candy) with Italian motifs and Hershey's kisses, and a dish of riotous rainbows known as "Christmas candy" and another of Italian hard candy molded in the shapes of slices of oranges, tangerines, and lemons and wrapped in foil picturing the respective fruit. Since horizontal surfaces always gather items, you might find the occasional wrapped Christmas gift there, or tossed aside gloves, house keys, and the usual other homey house items. In the drawers and cupboards below were kept tablecloths and napkins for all seasons, bowls and vases.

Other times of the year called for different decor. During non-holiday times, it might be paper napkins, tobacco tins, tossed-aside mail, a rolled up newspaper, cigar boxes. On Valentine's Day a big heart-shaped box of candy might lay there, tempting a small girl with a sweet tooth. During the summer, ripening tomatoes from Grandpa's flourishing garden perched on the sills of the two small windows which flanked either end of the sideboard like soldiers on patrol, and any overflow would make its way to the sideboard. If it were the season for fresh-picked vegetables, a paper bag of them would be waiting there for us to take home when we left: fat fragrant tomatoes, stolid green zucchini, long emerald cucumbers, fresh garlic, heady onions. At Thanksgiving, the sideboard played host to bowls of mixed nuts in the shell, filberts, almonds, walnuts, pecans, Brazil nuts, and the tarnished silver nutcrackers older than I was, and butternut squash and pumpkin pies with their shiny orangy-brown tops and fluted crust leaving the faint aroma of cinnamon and nutmeg everywhere. There might be a vase of zinnias in the fall or roses in summer, but always in the spring there would be a big jarful of soft grey pussy willows, cut live from the branches, so cuddly and rabbit's-foot-like that they would be irresistible to pet.

Oh, and then it was Easter, and the cookie platters were back, with a wee difference. The heavier cookies were gone and strewn among the wine biscuits and butterballs were egg biscuits, light as a feather and pale brown, coated on top with just the faintest suggestion of white icing, all flecked with a pinch of multicolor sprinkles. Instead of Hershey kisses accompanying the little torrone boxes in their colorful Italian designs, there were small chocolate eggs in Easter pastel finery and occasionally a smattering of jellybeans. It was the time of year for rice pie, and one or two would be waiting there for company, set on the table to be cut into soft sweet pieces and accompanied by the fragrant coffee that always seemed to be percolating on the stove. Bobbing their white heads over it all would be the waxy, pristine branches of the Easter lilies set in a pot with purple or pink or blue foil around it, nodding a spring greeting.

I think of chalk pictures and Mary Poppins, and wish I knew some way to reach into that picture, touch the sideboard, be transported just one more time...

"There's a Place for Each Small One--God Planned It That Way..."

This originally appeared in the Christmas TV History blog as a "Christmas in July" entry in 2014:

The story of The Small One and I go way back. Really way back, to a time when speeds were lower and cars were heavier, and the best place to be on the traditional “Sunday drive” was sitting between Dad and Mom on the broad front seat of a ‘50's Pontiac, snuggled against Mom while we listened to the last vestiges of old-time radio: NBC’s Monitor, the original Gunsmoke with William Conrad as Matt Dillon, and those others struggling against television’s relentless tide.

Except at Christmas. Those late December Sundays and few days before Christmas were still reserved for Christmas stories, and for many years after radio had abandoned itself to all-music/all-news formats, one radio station in town (I believe it was WJAR or perhaps WPRO) still played those well-loved stories on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, and it was those broadcasts I remember, Lionel Barrymore as Scrooge in A Christmas Carol, Jack Benny Christmas shopping...but especially the tale of a boy and his elderly donkey Small One, retold year after year by Bing Crosby.

In 1978, Disney brought the story of The Small One to film as a half-hour short preceding the re-release of Pinocchio. It was thought an odd choice for Disney, since they usually avoided stories with references to religion, but the story itself was pure Disney: the age-old tale of the friendship between a child and an animal. In The Small One, an unnamed Judean lad has made a pet of one of his father’s work animals, an aged donkey who finds it increasingly difficult to carry loads of firewood. When the impoverished woodcutter finally tells his son that he can no longer afford to keep Small One if he can’t work and will be taking the donkey into town to sell, the grieving boy offers to do the task himself, determined to find his friend a good home.

And there, onscreen, was the story I remembered from those Christmas Eves years before: the boy’s relationship with Small One, lovingly detailed in play and teamwork; the heart-stopping moment where the boy realizes that there is only one destiny for his pet; their adventures in town, enlivened by the jaunty but cynical “Merchant’s Song”; the final despair that ends in hope when a man named Joseph chooses Small One to carry his wife to Bethlehem. The story is bookended by Don Bluth’s plaintive “Small One” song, which still reduces me to puddling goo each time I play the DVD.

The Small One is a tale of friendship that can be watched in a secular manner as the story of a boy and his pet, or as a story of faith and the first Christmas. But—if I can bear to close my eyes to the lovely animation that long—I can almost, almost turn the clock back to another Christmas story, one of spindly pine trees draped with lead tinsel to fill in the “bald spots,” “big bulb” Christmas lights and vintage 1950s ornaments, the rich scents of molasses and almonds while baking cookies, Christmas Mass with the music of the choir and the organ at full joyful throttle, long-playing records dispensing Perry Como and Nat King Cole, visits to Grandpa with the whole family celebrating in the warm cozy cellar—but most of all of being warm and happy next to Mom as the hum of the car wheels and the lullaby of The Small One take me off to sleep.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
The original story by Charles Tazewell.

The Bing Crosby version.

"I Know What Those Are..."

When James first saw Leia as a puppy, he met her mother, a purebred beagle, and was told her father was a cocker spaniel. She was a charmingly sweet dog all her life, "so laid back she was falling over," as in the filksong, an amiable lady who was content to simply rest at James' feet or lie next to his craft room as he was working, but if there was cocker spaniel in her anywhere, it was submerged under more powerful genes. I believe her mom had an active social life at that time. ☺ Leia's huge lopped-down ears that gave her her name (because they looked like the doggie equivalent of Princess Leia's earmuffs) turned into equally enormous stand-up ears (with whimsical voices we used to ask her if she could get the BBC) and she ended up resembling a half-size German Shepherd, with the black saddle upon brown.

One Christmas Eve I had some errands to do, but Leia was acting particularly droopy. We were going to leave her alone the next day, and I took pity on her. It was a nice cool day, unlike at least one Christmas when I flew home to Rhode Island and it was 70°F when the plane took off, so I had no qualms spreading a towel over the back seat and having her lie there as I drove around doing my errands. She loved car rides. I remember dropping off some gifts at the Elder house and getting gasoline, with Leia happily lying on the seat of "Shadow," my Dodge Omni, lolling her tongue and occasionally sitting up when I came to a stop so she could peer out the window.

I had one final errand somewhere, and I'm not sure where, but I was going there by way of Windy Hill Road. As you near Cobb Parkway, there's a spot where a QuikTrip gas station stands now, but back then it was an empty field that fronted the Sleepy Hollow Kennel, a boarding and training facility. Traffic was backed up at the traffic light and I had the leisure to note with interest that on this grassy landscape someone had erected a living Nativity. There was a wooden stable set up, and, although the people playing the Biblical characters were not yet there, the livestock was already situated. A donkey was tethered near the stable, near a sign advertising the Living Nativity later that evening, and in front of it were several sheep, cropping at hay bales that had been left out for them.

I heard Leia's claws scrabble on the door and since traffic was stopped dead I could look back at her, and when I did, I burst out laughing. There she was, staring at those sheep with an intensity that nearly burned through the glass. Her mouth was parted a little, but she wasn't doggy "smiling," it was almost if she looked astonished. This was the dog who as a half-grown youngling already brought up with a litter of kittens went to "Auntie Anne" to narc on Buttercup for moving her latest litter. And who, as she got older, tried to herd the kittens. And now she was giving the sheep the one over with a sort of half-dawning recognition in her eye. You could almost see thought balloons coming from her, as if she were a character from "the funnies.": "I know what those are! They're...they're...I know what those are! I'm supposed to do something with them, but I can't remember what. But I do know what those are..."

Then the light changed and the car moved and she went back to being laid-back Leia again, but I still remember that Christmas Eve when all her little buried sheepdog instincts came through.

The House Without a Christmas Tree

Remember these? They were all the rage in the 1970s. People bought them ready-made, or, even more popular, bought a whiteware version which they then glazed at a "ceramics" class, and everyone's tree was fired in a big communal kiln. Then you would add the plastic colored "lights" and the star, and the entire tree would glow from an ordinary light bulb set within the tree. Some families added them to their other Christmas decorations, set on a china cabinet or breaking up a row of volumes on a bookshelf or used as a nightlight in a hallway.

For others...

The house next door to us was a big two-story home that had been built in the 1920s, and the land surrounding it, including our lot and the house on the corner as well as the land across the street, belonged to my godmother's family, the Danellas. My godmother grew up in the house and was part of the first class to graduate from Hugh B. Bain Junior High School in the last years of the 20s, and later she lived there with her mother and her husband, with her brother, sister-in-law, and niece living upstairs.

When her family sold that land and our house was built there, Mom and Dad must have found the two families next door good neighbors as well. My mother's mother quickly made friends with my godmother's mother, although both women struggled to understand one another as they were from different regions of Italy and the dialects were often quite disparate. In the empty lot next door that still belonged to the Danella family, an enormous vegetable garden grew each year, and there were pear and plum trees along the driveway, and a grape arbor in the small back yard. My godfather, Angelo Montella, was our fuel oil dealer, a genial, moon-faced man who was a soft touch for animals like my mother. If it were up to the two of them, they would have taken in every stray cat in the neighborhood. My godmother, Lillian Danella Montella, was a matter-of-fact, sensible woman. She kept an immaculate house despite the fact that she worked, went to the hairdresser once a week, and nursed her mother through her last years. Mother came to trust "Padina Lillian" ("Padina" being what you called your godmother if you're Italian) and when I was born she and Padine Angelo became my godmother.

I remember trotting across our driveway to her house on errands, to visit on holidays and on her birthday, which was August, and when I was tiny her mother "Zia Maria" and Victoria's mother "Zia Maria Antonia" (Victoria and her mother lived on the opposite side of the chain link fence from the old Speedway which separated our properties) would babysit me if Mother had to do an errand. In the summer she would come home to find me enthroned in one of the Adirondak chairs under the grape arbor, eating cantaloupe and grapes, and plums and pears from the trees.

My godparents never had children, and I was never nosy enough to inquire if they regretted it or not. It wasn't my place. But I always worried about them at Christmas, for they never had a Christmas tree. My godmother explained gently that they didn't really need a tree, they had no children. Trees were for families.

This didn't mean their house didn't have a festive air at all during the holidays. In our neighborhood front doors were only for company; in fact in winter, many people, like us, blocked up our door for the winter, which is why you would drive about New England in those days in February and still see Christmas bells, wreaths, spray snow, and other decorations on front doors. So you entered Padina's house through the side door, a big, stolid wooden door painted green, the entrance to the cellar on the very left, and up a short flight of steps to the back door (next to this door were the stairs to go upstairs to the apartment where Jimmy, Dotty, and Cindy lived). There would be something Christmasy on the door, a little wreath, perhaps, or a couple of Christmas cards. The door opened directly to the kitchen, which was, when I originally knew it, very old fashioned, with beadboard all around and a vintage gas stove against the left wall with a chimney pipe which went into the wall. For many years Zia Maria's rocker was right under the back window.

In the middle of the room was the kitchen table and there might be a Christmasy tablecloth or a little centerpiece, perhaps some curtains that were less summery than before. To either side of the door was a bedroom, and at the very corner of the kitchen was the glass-paned door with the glass doorknob that led into the formal dining room with the parlor and Padina's piano beyond. (The parlor was almost never used except at night when Padina might play her piano; in summer when the windows were open the classical pieces she played floated out the windows like heavenly birdsong.) I never knew them to keep a television in the parlor; after Zia Maria died, they made one of the bedrooms into a den and had the TV there, formerly it was always in the kitchen and so were they.

I loved that glass door. Just seeing Padina's neat-as-pin dining room, something we had no room for, and the shadowy parlor with the beautiful spinet beyond and all the lovely old woodwork was like looking into a magic world. At Christmas my godparents tacked up all their Christmas cards around that glass door and made it more magical still. But I was still always sorry that they had no beautiful Christmas tree to look at.

One Christmas season, and I have forgotten what year it was, or how old I was, Padina beckoned me in the house. The cards were already bedecking the glass door as she opened it and ushered me into the dining room, where it was cool and dim. Then she clicked a switch and the top of the buffet glowed with color. "There," she said matter-of-factly, but with slight amusement somewhere in the background, "do you feel better?" Set between the candlesticks was a ceramic tree that she had bought, or perhaps had been given, I don't recall longer. The details have blurred—did it have snow on the tips of its branches? or was the star large or small? the bulbs differently shaped?—but I remember the happy spectrum of color and the comfort of knowing they finally had a tree. It wasn't a big tree, nor one with shiny ornaments, or traditional tinsel icicles. But it was a Christmas tree, and in some way it was enough.

Surprise and Remembrance

When you were Italian and Catholic, Sundays always began with Mass.

You wore your best for church in the 1940s. One particular Sunday morning a young woman living in Providence, RI, in the Federal Hill neighborhood overlooking the downtown shopping area, then largely an Italian neighborhood, was dressing for Mass. Like most young women of the time, she took pride in dressing in the latest fashion. It was a cold December day, so she probably donned a long-sleeved blouse and a wool skirt, or perhaps a woolen dress. She would carefully pull up silk stockings, fastened in body-twisting motions to a garter belt, and then check and recheck in the mirror that her seams were straight. A prink here and a tiny careful tug there made it just so. Feet then slipped high-heeled pumps. She fixed her short wavy dark hair in the latest style, then made up her face, patting on just the tiniest bit of rouge and the bright red lipstick of the time.

Her parents also were dressed in their best for church, as well as her younger brother, slim and natty in his suit. They probably walked to church, Our Lady of Mount Carmel, bundling their coats around them. Women wore dressy hats back then, but not the type that kept your ears warm; instead they were cute little creations in bright colors perched on top of your head, tilted at a saucy angle, some with decorative veils, others with a jeweled brooch. Gloves were also in fashion, sleek leather or perhaps thick wool for a Sunday eighteen days before Christmas. In church you would be elbow to elbow with others in wool coats, snug scarves, and fur collars. Presumably some of the coats had just come out of  storage and along with the scent of women's cologne and Old Spice was the faint trace of camphor. Sunday Mass was full of music and incense, the service in majestic Latin, the choir in full throat along with the pipes of the organ. It was Advent and the priest would be in vestments of violet touched with gold and white.

Post service, despite the winter wind, you would stand and talk with your friends for a few minutes until the lure of Sunday dinner took you home. If you wanted to receive Communion, you couldn't eat breakfast, so it was a particularly hungry family who arrived home. Putting on patterned full aprons to cover their Sunday dresses, the young woman and her mother boiled macaroni, tossed a big green salad with oil and vinegar, and stirred up the "gravy" that had been simmering on the back of the stove, redolent of tomatoes and garlic and meatballs. The table set, they gathered around, said grace, and enjoyed their Sunday dinner along with Italian bread fresh from the neighborhood bakery and some type of dessert, perhaps a lemon square or a sfogliatelle.

Sunday afternoon for this working-class family was for visiting or for a movie. Our young lady's father settled before the radio set, perhaps to listen to a football game or a concert. Younger brother went out to see "his girl." If he was flush they might go to the movies and have an ice cream sundae afterwards. Perhaps this Sunday they might only visit at her mother's house.

Our young woman and her mother set out to visit a cousin who lived nearby. Of course they walked; no one jumped in a car back then for distances of a few blocks. They bundled up against the cold with scarves and kerchiefs, strolling the sidewalk that lined the steps leading up to the triple-deckers and the duplexes.

As they passed the house of a friend, an upstairs window flew open, and a woman's head emerged. She was wildly excited, called out the name of the young woman and her mother. She wanted to know...had they heard the news on the radio?

They were astonished. No, they had left the house before Papa turned on the radio. What was wrong?

This was how my mother and my grandmother learned about the attack on Pearl Harbor. They rushed up the stairs of their cousin's house, only to hear the awful first bulletins on the radio. The newscasters' words were in English and Mother had to translate for her mother. She did so with tears in her eyes, for every woman who heard the news that day interpreted the terrible truth in one way: that their sons and brothers and fiances and husbands would be going to war.

Later they walked home. People were out on the street now, talking about the news. Some men boasted they would enlist the very next day. Others looked troubled. Women wept. How could one go home and sit in their living rooms or their kitchens, and drink coffee when this had happened? Just sit around and listen to the radio?

It was as if their thoughts coalesced into one. Grandpa rose from his chair and donned coat and hat to join his wife and his daughter, and they walked back to church. The doors were always open and one by one, in small groups or in lines of family members, they filed in, some crying, some still stunned. The church was warm with steam heat and still held the odor of incense from earlier Masses, plus the perpetual scent of the candles burning in rows upon rows in metal stands that clustered around the altar, flickering red and blue and gold in their jewel-bright glass candle holders. From the rectory the priests came out, one by one, their surplices still askew, to hold hands, to comfort, to pray.

Mother told me that story so many times that it is almost as if I were there myself, burned into me like my own memory. World War II, a quarter century earlier, was as real to me as Vietnam already boiling up under the children of the 1960s. Each time I hear Roosevelt's "Day of Infamy" speech I still get gooseflesh. I can feel the December cold on my legs, smell the warm candles at church, hear the weeping of the mothers and the sisters and the wives. I know what they lost but will never know the total depth of that feeling on December 7, 1941.