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.

Expanded Reprint: (H)Motel 128

Talk about traveling in time. When I saw this postcard I was "Little Rosie" again, as in the "Rose is Rose" comic strip, about eight years old and watching the world from the right-side backseat of our black 1958 Chevrolet Impala (oh-so-imaginatively dubbed "Blackie").

My dad's youngest sister had married a man who was in the home construction field. Later in the 70s when the housing boom died in New England they moved down to Maryland, then to Florida. But at this particular time, the early Sixties, they lived in Peabody, Massachusetts along with their adopted daughter. My dad's youngest brother worked with him at the time, and he, his wife, and his son, a couple of years older than myself, lived nearby in Beverly. Before my mom got a part-time job to supplement our income and we could go to more "touristy" places, our yearly vacation consisted of spending a week with each family.

Each household had its own charms. Dad's brother lived in a place that was right on the street, like photos you see of English homes: a sidewalk, a step, a door, and you are in the house. The land sloped precipitously down at the back of the property, so you had to descend a long wooden staircase to the back yard to play with the English springer spaniel, Jeff, who ate Cocoa Puffs for breakfast and was that great miracle to an allergic kid, a pet dog! My aunt didn't buy groceries at any old neighborhood store like we did: she shopped at an "exotic" supermarket called an "IGA." Dad's sister had a modern, all-electric ranch house with a refrigerator built directly into the cabinets (it seemed so odd to find the milk right next to the cabinet the cereal was kept in). But the big hit here was the big inground pool, which my uncle seemed to clean more than he swam in. My cousin and I would have been in the pool all day if our mothers had permitted it, slathered in layers upon layers of Coppertone. Both aunts took us to that most exciting of all places, a real shopping mall, Northshore--oh, not enclosed in those days, but a mall just the same, with all those "foreign" Boston stores: Jordan Marsh, Filenes, Marshalls. After one vacation week my tricycle came home with us from Jordan Marsh.

Aside from vacations, though, every month or two from early spring to late fall we'd wake up early on a Sunday morning and "go to Massachusetts." Originally this was a longer drive before Interstate 95 was finished. Dad would swear all the way to Dedham because U.S. 1 was clotted with small towns, traffic lights, and "Sunday drivers." And there was the big glittering attraction of Jolly Cholly's amusement park in North Attleboro, with its huge clown logo, enough to leave a youngster with eyes big as those proverbial saucers pleading "Can we come here some time?" You could smell the hot popcorn and peanuts, and the sharp sugar tang of the cotton candy all the way to the street.

Dedham was a relief because that's when you reached Route 128 (otherwise known as "the New England Circumferential Highway"—don't worry, no one actually called it that; it was just so designated on the map). It was one of the first freeways in the area and once you got on you didn't have to worry about a traffic light (except for one stretch of road almost to Peabody). Being on 128 was almost like being home. We'd get on at Exit 63 and I would spend the time counting up to Exit 32, which was where we got off. We locked our doors as we drove past Walpole where the state prison was. We'd crane our necks to try to see the tall tops of the television towers in Needham, where Channels  38 and  56 sent their signals out to the greater Boston area. We'd marvel at the huge Polaroid plant. We passed all the towns with their wonderful English-sounding names: Burlington, Dedham, Lexington, Concord, Needham, Wakefield, Wrentham. Dad's longstanding joke along this route was "You Needham? Just Dedham or Wrentham!" which probably makes your eyes roll now but was high humor to a six-year-old. We passed tempting places like big drive-in theatres and Pleasure Island, the big, big amusement park that had live stage shows with favorite celebrities—Lassie, the Lone Ranger, Buffalo Bob and Howdy Doody had appeared there, not to mention Boston kids' show icon Rex Trailer.

The H(M)otel 128 was the sign that you had really "arrived" at 128; it was set right on the intersection of U.S. 1 and Route 128, and the sign for it could be seen from all angles on the road. Although the post card above shows the name as being "Motel 128," the tall sign always indicated they thought more of themselves than your typical cinderblock motel with the flashing vacancy sign. The first letter was definitely shaped like an "H," but so written and colored so that an "M" appeared as well. At that point I had never stayed in a motel that I remembered; we'd gone to Florida when I was three, but all I remember was being hot on the train and playing in the sand, not the motel. And I'd never stayed at an honest-to-God hotel which of course had fantastic things like bellboys and a fancy restaurant and elevators and big, long hallways with moulding and wallpaper and carpeting, like the places rich bachelors lived on TV. What now looks hideously dated, with cookie-cutter pseudo futuristic furniture and bad color combinations, was back then a glimpse of opulent paradise and modernity, of that other world out there that only existed in the square boxed screen of the television, and the gateway to adventure west and north of Boston as well.

The Little House

I knew I’d grown up in a small house, but I didn’t realize how small until after my mom passed on when we were going through the layered contents of the old steamer trunk that sat in our basement for years. Mom’s wedding dress was carefully folded at the very bottom, yards and yards of heavy ivory white satin with a long train, bureau scarves, the metal cashbox that held emergency money, and various odd things like some rough sacklike pillowcases that I suspected had belonged to my grandparents. The trunk itself was a remnant of my grandparents’ past; it had been used when they packed up the family in 1924 and moved from tiny Lafferty, Ohio (today a few miles off I-70, and still a tiny town when we detoured there in 1978 on the way back from California) to Providence, Rhode Island, where Grandpa had been offered a job in a foundry, and still has the brownish, faded 1924 baggage tag stuck haphazardly to its side. One of the more interesting things found in the trunk were the original 1951 house plans, complete with a notation that a coal bin could be fitted into the cellar, if necessary, as the boiler was equipped to burn both oil and coal. The first floor footage was only 782 square feet.

There were days we each had our cozy corners, Mom under the three-way lamp in the armchair, knitting or crocheting, Dad in one corner of the sofa usually asleep, and me, either at the other end of the sofa, surrounded by my lap desk and pens and paper or a book (you had to do something during the commercials), all watching the square, sturdy GE television that one day morphed into a Magnavox "portable" that eventually, happily at Christmas of 1972, finally turned into a color TV. There were other days of housecleaning or rushing around that it seemed there was never room enough.

Granted, we did some living in other parts of the house. The attic, as previously mentioned, acted as a kind of storeroom. The basement, anchored in the center by a big cast iron boiler compartment, was unfinished at first except for a small northwest corner which Dad partitioned off in Masonite in hopes of making wine like his father did. I vaguely remember a big oak barrel in the little room, but the experiment didn’t last long. Still,  it remained “the wine cellar” in nomenclature for years afterward, keeping the Christmas tree intact (Dad didn’t like putting lights on the tree anymore than I do now), with handmade wooden shelves in one corner as an overflow pantry where multiple sale items were kept for storage until needed: canned goods, paper towels, toiletries. The oil tank was neatly against the wall in the opposite corner where it was periodically filled by my godfather (our oil man), with the clothes washer (and later gas dryer) next to it along the wall that paralleled the driveway. Dad later fixed three quarters of the basement with a drop ceiling of acoustical tile, wooden floor covered in inexpensive linoleum squares, and the 1970s de rigueur dark-brown paneled walls. It was downstairs I had my first ever-birthday party—I was twelve—in which the guests were all kids my age rather than a few friends mixed up with relatives. Later Dad also installed our old enamel sink and the old Glenwood gas stove down there so in the still humid throes of September we could can tomato sauce in relative coolness. Our old kitchen table, Mom’s sewing machine, the aforementioned steamer trunk, and the old sofa completed the turnout. Near the wine cellar I had a little space where I kept two bookshelves of hardback books (some were my mom’s) and shelves on the wall which held my rows of paperbacks, plus the old red-maple child-sized old roll-top desk and swivel chair I’d gotten from my cousin Johnny. Flanking one of the book cases on either side were closets that held seldom used clothes like Mom’s and my dressy dresses, bathrobes in summer and sunsuits in winter.

The house itself was that most ubiquitous of New England structures, the Cape Cod, with a small apron of lawn out front; however, since the lot was short and narrow (the width of a one-car driveway, the house, and a green stretch of lawn and flower bed to the side that wasn’t more than three feet wide), the home had been turned 90 degrees—instead of the front door being on the long end of the house, it was on the short end, opening directly into the living room (we called it the parlor). To the back of the parlor were the stairs to go upstairs, and you exited the room at left through the arch to a short hallway, tiled, like the kitchen, with pale yellow with black accents. Mom and Dad’s room was to the left of the parlor, followed down the length of the house by the equally ubiquitous pink-tiled and -painted bathroom, and then the yellow kitchen. My bedroom was opposite the kitchen, and between my room and the parlor were the stairs down to the basement. In the house's original incarnation, the rest of the rooms were wallpapered. No gayly-flowered 50s fashion for us; the parlor wallpaper was a pattern of curves and pediments that would not have looked out of place in a Victorian home. My room was striped pink, green, and silver, and my parents' room was similarly attired but in different colors. Once the wallpaper came down, we emerged into Mom's "beige era." Oh, all the rooms were a different shade of beige, but there it was—Dad and I dubbed it "everlasting beige" and fought it tooth and nail. Eventually Mom gave in: my room turned a pretty sky blue, their room a golden, dark yellow, and the parlor another ubiquitous 1970s color, terra cotta (which matched the fabric on the sofa and chair). It didn't last long: after fifteen years and Dad's death, Mom went back to "everlasting beige" once again.

Tacked on to the back of the house was an small enclosed porch just big enough for three in woven tape lawn chairs which had begun life as a simple square platform. In winter the winds came skidding from Cooney Field across the street and anyone standing on the porch attempting to open the back door rattled their teeth in the cold as they groped for their keys, so a roof was soon added and then walls and windows. In the wee hours of dark mornings, even in the cold winter over the low grumble of the boiler, I could hear the porch door open and then clunk close as the Hood's milkman made his delivery; in spring with the windows open the clink of the milk bottles would add music to the percussion.

Behind the house lay a small lawn, small enough to be manageable when mowing, large enough to fit a small shed, a full-size clothesline (which for at least one year flapped nearly daily with diapers), and even a small vegetable garden up against the old fence which went back decades to when the area behind our house was a racetrack. Mom's rosebush grew against the fence each summer, winding the chain link with tangled thorny vines  that ended in riots of small red roses. In winter I dug paths along the snow with my feet through the yard and then rode my stick horse through the paths, pretending to be Trixie Belden on her favorite of the Wheeler mares, Susie, or Annie Oakley rescuing her little brother Tagg yet again. And in the spring, oh, in the spring, for a few delicious weeks in May, Charlie's unkempt lilac bush draped its fragrant branches over the chain link fence, dripping with heavenly scented armfuls of pale purple lilacs. I never failed to bury my nose in them, even if later I was punished with the mother of all allergy attacks.

The house I remember best at Christmas, sparkling with tinsel and candoliers at the window, and in summer when the relentless heat brought every orifice open and the sounds of the street inside; the basement was for hot summer days; the attic for memories—but the yard I always remember for those brief weeks of spring and the draping lilacs. Surely heaven smells of lilacs...