A Child's Christmas in Delaware

Reconstructing a childhood Christmas from available evidence

“Our snow was not only shaken from white wash buckets down the sky, it came shawling out of the ground and swam and drifted out of the arms and hands and bodies of the trees; snow grew overnight on the roofs of the houses like a pure and grandfather moss, minutely -ivied the walls and settled on the postman, opening the gate, like a dumb, numb thunder-storm of white, torn Christmas cards.”

That’s from Dylan Thomas’ A Child’s Christmas in Wales, which is — as far as I am concerned — the quintessential story of a childhood holiday remembered in adulthood.¹ No better one can be writ. IMHO.

And yet, here I am, standing under the feet of a giant.

OK, enough of my disclaimer. The point is, memory is a tricky thing. Thomas was thinking back maybe 20 years to his childhood in Swansea, Wales in the early nineteen-twenties, retelling his story with mythical coherence. In contrast, I am going back sixty years or more and providing you, gentle reader, with what might feel like 10 pieces of a 300-piece jigsaw puzzle.

Not being a legendary poet with a mind enriched by myth and meter, I’m finding that re-membering events is more of a community project — one person’s recollection spurs discussion, maybe disagreement about dates, times and who else was in the room, and often there are diversions to unrelated events or people through some mental process of unconscious cohesion.

Take, for example, snowfall in Wilmington Delaware in the middle of the previous century. As I remember it, snow started falling in mid-December, there was always snow on the ground for the holidays, and snow continued to cover any un-plowed ground surface continuously until the first patch of grass re-appeared in March.

23 Briar Road, adorned with Moravian star., but without snow.

My pal John, ever the teacher/researcher, just sent me some statistics regarding snow on Christmas morning in Delaware in the 1960s. There were only four snow-covered Christmas mornings. In 1969 new snow fell during Christmas Day. But in 1964 it was warm enough to coax up the crocuses - 69 degrees.

Back in the day we went to church as a family every Sunday. Before Christmas, Granddad would take the train up from Baltimore to stay with us for a few days. He had this beautiful sonorous baritone singing voice which I loved hearing next to me.

For years we would put out a treat for Santa on a small table by the fireplace so he wouldn’t miss it: a few Christmas cookies and a tangerine. Very traditional. It wasn’t until years later that I would make the connection to our grandfather’s love of tangerines. He would dexterously peel the fruit with his thumb and middle finger, having lost his index finger in a lab accident decades before.

For holiday music in the home, I remember three albums. Two were “adult” LPs featuring the Robert Shaw Chorale, but the youngsters’ favorite was the album ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas by Fred Waring and the Pennsylvanians. Apparently swing jazz versions of holiday songs were a big hit in a house of young Boomers.

We made the cookies from scratch, and by “we” I mean my sisters and our mom. The dough was chilled in several pieces wrapped in waxed paper, and needed to be worked on a huge heavy slab of marble they would carry from the disassembled marble-top table in the living room and place it on the kitchen table. When the dough got too warm to work with, it was placed back in the fridge and another piece brought out.

The results were thin butter cookies, with sprinkles on each — red, green or both. The pattern would depend on the artist, but everyone understood that Hickmans do not “go crazy” with the sprinkles. Shapes were traditional, from cookie cutters which looked, even back then, like they were made during the Civil War: round, reindeer, Santa, stocking, star and in honor of our dog MacDuff, a scottie. Any leftover too small for a cutter was formed into a shape we called a “symbol,” and was prized among all the cookies.

All the Christmases roll down toward the two-tongued sea, like a cold and headlong moon bundling down the sky that was our street…

At this point in the essay, the contrast between Dylan Thomas and this writer could not be more clear. If you’ve not read Thomas, you can here. Or listen to his reading here.

The very young me went through the “Santa is real” phase. Looking back I imagine that my older sisters had to go along with this myth, until that age where I caught up to their level of awareness. After that age we would all look under our parents’ bed where the wrapped presents were stashed, trying to get a preview of things to come, or at least the size and shape of things to come.

The first sight of the tree the morning of was a delight and an amazement. But prior to that moment we three children sat at the top of the stairs while mom and dad completed the arrangement of things in the living room. We hung out in our pjs until we got permission to descend into room full of light and treasure.²

Our tree full of light. Treasure not shown.

The details of any given Christmas morning? For me, mostly gone. All the years are a collective, homogenous impression. The pace of opening gifts was slow. You opened one, considered it for a few minutes, maybe watched another person open their present. But everyone understood that Hickmans do not “go crazy” with the gift-opening part of Christmas morning. For all the giddy anticipation I remember the mornings as peaceful and fun. After the gifts, mom or dad would collect the wrappings and ribbons into a bag. Then there was breakfast.

Sometime later in the morning my sugar rush from all that hot cocoa wore off and I could think about next steps. I think at some point in the morning I would call up Bill or John and talk about how we fared, gift-wise. We would get together later in the day depending on our respective meal and church times.

Night fell. The neighborhood holiday lights glinted off the snow just as before, but some corner had been turned since that morning. The trappings of the season were not about anticipation now; they were about a day receding into the past. Thomas told his story without a sense of nostalgia, as though the child were still alive inside. There was no glorifying the past nor grieving the changing times.

Even now the music and lights and trimmings still delight. Each year I read to myself one of the Gospels. Each year we watch the original 1965 Peanuts special. I dig out the old Caedmon recording of Dylan Thomas. We trim some kind of tree each year, and bring out the old ornaments from the 1950s, each wrapped in tissue and nestled like eggs in brittle boxes with green lettering: Shiny Brite Glass Christmas Tree Ornaments, below which there is an image of Uncle Sam shaking hands with Santa Claus with “American Made” underneath.

A 1950 Shiny Brite ornament shown here on our eco-minded artificial tree.

Somehow muted in the mix is the person’s birthday we are celebrating. Energy and effort is spent conforming to traditions, or trying to recreate an old feeling. It brings us joy. But I can’t help thinking that somewhere there is real transformation of the mind and spirit — the one the Birthday Boy would later talk about: practicing goodwill; forgiving self and others; being alert to neighbors in need; living toward ones higher angels. I am working on these, seven decades on.

Maybe the renewal he talked about is close at hand, wrapped up in the beautiful trial and error of life.

Looking through my bedroom window, out into the moonlight and the unending smoke-colored snow, I could see the lights in the windows of all the other houses on our hill and hear the music rising from them up the long, steady falling night. I turned the gas down, I got into bed. I said some words to the close and holy darkness, and then I slept.

1. The story appeared in Harpers Bazaar in 1950, and in 1952 he made a recording of it with other poems for the Caedmon label. A year later he died, age 39, of pneumonia.

2. Accounts vary. My impression is that we did this every Christmas of my entire childhood. My sister Pat remembers we did this a few times, which is more likely.