PERSPECTIVES: Dreaming of Christmas When I Was Very Young

Mother, author, and panda, Christmas Day, 1944.

by James C. Johnston Jr.

When you are very young, Christmas is a very special time of the year unlike any other. The winter cold has set in, and the entire world seems white and cold. The front yard has become inhabited by snowmen who wear odd clothing, scarves, and hats, and have mouths arranged in crooked smiles made of chunks of coal and from which protrudes a pipe from which no smoke issues. My Great Grandfather Martin smoked a pipe, and the smoke which came from it had a fragrance that seemed to make wherever he located himself warm and comforting. I loved the aroma of that pipe smoke, and thinking of it, and if I close my eyes and let my mind wander a bit down the hallways of deep memory I can almost conjure up the aroma of it still.

Years later when I went off to college, I began to smoke a pipe myself. I liked exotic tobaccos. My Professor of Irish Literature, Dr. Vincent Gannon, who was also a very accomplished musician and fellow pipe-smoker, made me a gift of a tobacco called Balkan Sobranie. I smoked it for the next twenty years, along with cigarettes and cigars. When I was thirty-eight, and could no longer breath, I decided to toss all of my cigarettes, cigars, pipe tobacco, and pipes into the blazing fire before me in my living room and smoke no more. It was the Christmas season and more than forty years ago, and that gift of life, given to myself was life-saving common sense which has allowed me to see my eightieth Christmas. I guess that dumb luck and not smoking does buy us some extra time.

My first Christmas, December 25, 1944, was memorialized for me in an old black and white photograph of me and my mother by my first Christmas tree. Next to me is my panda bear which was as big as me, and I was transfixed and fascinated by the utter delight of basking in the splendor of the pretty lights, and shiny multi-colored Christmas bulbs, and color absorbing silver tinsel hanging on the tree like glittering strands of shimmering ice.

What I love most about Christmas is that it is a special time when little folks are allowed to suspend all thoughts of reality. Children are assisted in this wonderful self-deception by the active cooperation of almost the whole adult world which seems to be annually blessed with a special general feeling of seasonal benevolence which can be attached to no other holiday time. The world for a time becomes a magic place dominated by the generous spirit of a very large Elfin Man in a fur trimmed red velvet suit. He has a great white beard and moustache and is a very unlikely folk hero. He is huge yet very gentle, and he is kindly disposed to children all over the universe who have been good and generally well behaved throughout the year. He is the very soul of generosity who travels through the velvety dark of Christmas Eve in a large sleigh pulled by eight reindeer called: Comet, Cupid, Dasher, Dancer, Donner, Vixen, Prancer, and Blitzen.

Five years before my birth, in 1939, this famous octet was joined by very odd reindeer called Rudolf who seemed to have a red nose with unusual lighting properties which allowed him to guide Santa’s Sleigh through the perils of the night. I think that there was also a lesson there that it was alright to be a little different and still be accepted by your fellow reindeer. When one considers what was going on in Europe in !939, Rudolf was a living lesson in tolerance of individual differences. The German Nazis and their fellow Fascists were fueled by racial hatred of Jews, Gypsies, the mentally and physically infirm, and were also motivated by aggressive nationalism along with their intolerant hatred of generally anyone not conforming to the national image of what a German Superman must be.

But here was Rudolf, a Teutonic Reindeer, who was a trend setter in a fight for tolerance, or at least that’s what I got out of the morality tale of Rudolf the Red Nosed Reindeer as sung so sweetly to the nation by Gene Autrey starting in the Christmas season of 1949, just ten years after Rudolf’s birth. I thought a lot about this song and how Santa seemed to care about all of the children in the world, because he flew all over the planet, in times of both war and peace, delivering gifts to everybody whose behavior was both good and decent during the year without out regard to race or creed. I was pretty sure that Hitler and Mussolini didn’t even get any coal in their Christmas stockings.

Now Santa was a very good fellow of world saving ambitions. These thoughts stayed with me long after the man became just a charming part of the culture, and I was very sure that Joseph Stalin got coal in his stocking every Christmas, because he was such a mean fellow and hated America and freedom!

As a small child I thought a lot about such things because I absorbed all of the adult conversations taking place around me. A lot of those conversations were rather mundane, but there was a lot of political discussion going on too, and conversations about Civil Rights, and social problems as well. Adults were far more interesting than were my contemporaries. I loved learning about the world and the part that my ancestors had played in it. My family, like almost every other American family, was affected by the horrible reality of World War II which to me was so real and tangible because of all of the young veterans who were all around me in those post war Christmas seasons. I still have vague memories of my father returning home along with my cousins and uncles from that awful war. And for the next dozen of years I listened to the stories of their time spent in war-time in the Pacific and in Europe.

By the time I was twelve the horrors of “The Camps” run by the Nazis were very much a cruel reality. Many of the young men who set off to war as “Boys” returned around Christmas time in 1945 as battle-seasoned men both world-weary and tired. They were not the same care-free men as they had been just a few years earlier. They loved being home, and some of them like my Uncle Joe Foss, had fascinating souvenirs to show and give us. Things carved of ivory, walnut, and other materials exotic to our eyes were presented and these objects conjured up wild and romantic images of lands which could only exist in the magic of those wonderful books my mother was to read to us, her children, almost every night back when we were very young.

My father had a great sense of adventure. He had served in the Philippines during the war as well as other places very strange to us during World War II. He had boxes of strange sea shell necklaces and jewelry made of beautiful cat’s eyes, and other strangely fashioned objects, and all of those wonderful sea shells unlike anything we had ever collected on the shores of Cape Cod back in those days more than seventy years ago. All of these War-Time memories are mixed up with those of early Christmas and with those very temperamental Christmas tree lights.

I am sure that those of us of a certain vintage will remember that back in the last mid-century, in order for strands of Christmas lights to function, all of the lights must be in working order. If a single bulb, making-up the usual eight light strand, was burned out none of the lights on that strand would work. In those days, strands of lights were linked together- plugged end-to-end at each socket. So now none of the lights would work until you discovered which light was indeed “Blown-Out”.

One by one all the light bulbs would have to be tested until the offending failed bulb was found, replaced, and tossed away . There was no end of “Lighting Failures” which had to be discovered and corrected before the magic of the lighted tree could be revealed in the other-wise darkened living room. Getting the tree up about a week before Christmas was always a special event. There was a time when we would drive up to Upton to my great-grandfather’s farm and trudge out into the woods to find a Christmas Tree. For a few years, this was sort of an annual custom.

I remember when I was about nine years old, before the Christmas season was even contemplated in the sunny time of summer, that I saw a tree growing in the forest that I really liked in the Upton woods. Being all alone at the time, I decided that I would like to adopt this shapely little conifer and take it home with me. Somehow I got it out of the ground with its roots substantially intact. It had taken me a long time and a lot of determination to dig up this object of desire, and there was a price to pay. My hands were cut and bleeding, but I didn’t care. I was content to suffer in order to own this little tree which obviously wanted me to dig it up and give it a new and honored home. I dragged-carried-and otherwise got the tree back to our car.

“So what are you going to do with that?” I was asked when my father saw the tree I had kidnapped from its place in the forest.

“I am going to bring it home and plant it,” I replied.

“It’s going to die,” I was told, but I was allowed to give the whole project a shot. Today, more than seventy years later it stands at the big curve of my driveway at a height of more than sixty feet. Not bad for a tree randomly pulled out of the Upton woods by a nine-year-old-would-be Paul Bunyan. Now, I look at that very tree at Christmas time with its natural treasure of pine cones, which are better than any store-bought decorations when lightly frosted and tinged with winter snow, and I think how beautiful Christmas truly is when celebrated by nature in its own winter setting. Sometimes at the end of a sunny winter day the ice and snow-melt, caught just at the right time, form little icicles at the tips of the branches completing the whole decorative effect. It is Christmas perfection!

On Christmas eve, my parents, my sisters Linda and Janice, and our well-loved grandmother, who made her home with us for most of her life, would all pile into the car and make our way to Shrewsbury, Mass., to begin our Christmas calls. Our car was piled with gifts for dozens of people who were very precious to us. We liked making this trip best when snow was falling. My father had affixed heavy chains to all of our car’s wheels turning it into a tractor-tread-tank. He loved driving in the snow, and he was very good at it. We began our peregrinations about noon time of Christmas Eve Day with visits to the Thomas and Rita Maroney Family where the action of over-active young life was always a constant and Burl Ives Christmas Albums would be reliably playing on the hi-fi. This was a family that loved music and Christmas.

Then it was back to Franklin, by way of Milford where we visited with my youngish Great Aunt and Uncle Bill and their eight kids where we had a great time. Back in Franklin, we stopped by my Aunt Ada and Uncle Birger Meline house on a hill that is now the center of the Benjamin Franklin Plaza on Rt. 140, Then it was on to my Aunt Charlotte’s and Uncle Lucky’s house. My Uncle Lucky got his nickname in the Second World War when he was hospitalized with a bad infection and could not be on his ship when it put out to sea. That ship was sunk by a torpedo with the loss of all hands in the dead of night during a storm at sea just a few days later. We would then push on to My Uncle Bill and Aunt May’s and a dozen other relatives and close friends before making our final and favorite call at the Clark House on Union Street in Franklin. Here everything was warm and wonderful. Harold and Alice Clark were the souls of seasonal delight. Their lovely old house was filled with family and friends and wonderful things to eat. I will always remember those butter cookies that melted on contact with the mouth. Getting the wrong punch one season by accident also brightened one Christmas Eve a bit more than I anticipated. I was just a little more jolly than I might have been otherwise. No harm done.

Then it was to home and bed. Yes, it was now well after eleven o’clock and all things bright and beautiful were about to burst upon us in an avalanche of Christmas bounty. This was the magic time even though the idea of Santa Claus was no longer a part of my reality much after I was six. I played along with the game and pretended that I believed that Santa was real. I think that I pushed that little game until I was twenty-something. I was, after all, a very self-confessed greedy child who wanted nice things. I am happy to say that this aspect of my personality has never really changed nor is it likely to.

By mid-night, I was in my bed wrapped up in my quilts and fuzzy blankets all nice and warm and very content. I closed my eyes, and then that special magical sound of the season delighted my ears more than any cantata ever could. I heard the sound of tire-chains tinkling out their music in the holy night as vehicles passed the house in the roadway. I really don’t know why, but the sounds of those chains on the road were very reassuring and beautiful to hear. To me this sound was the very essence of the spirit of the holiday season, and I fell to sleep smiling and dreaming the best dreams of Christmas.

James C. Johnston Jr. is a former Franklin selectman, Franklin High School history teacher, and author of "The African Son," a novel , as well as "The Yankee Fleet" and "Odyssey in the Wilderness," (a history of Franklin, Massachusetts). Article copyright James C. Johnston, Jr. 2023, used with permission.