Pie Plates and Carpet Sweepers

My Aunt Kathleen finally moved out of the Magowan family home on Hopmeadow Road in Simsbury Connecticut this month. Her house had been built by Ensign-Bickford, the company my grandfather had worked for most of his life, and she had lived in it since high school. I suppose it was a “company house,” but a very attractive one nonetheless, suitable for their head accountant. Kathleen is now comfortably settled in a nice retirement community on the bluff above the town, but another chapter in our family’s history has been shuttered.

I am sending her a photograph that I took during a visit this past summer. That, and the very cold weather we experienced this morning, got me to thinking about the only Christmas my family spent in Simsbury, back in 1960. I have been musing on the subject, trying to decide which Christmas was my all-time favorite, and that is the one that keeps rising to the top.

Our trip back East started out auspiciously, aboard a helicopter that took us from the heliport in Sausalito to SFO. It ended less so on a commuter flight from New York to Hartford in a blizzard. Our plane bucked and bumped all the way, as I kept a barf bag at hand. (BTW: Is there any other commonly-used term that sounds as comical as “barf bag”?)

The next morning, we awoke to a proverbial Winter Wonderland. Being only five, most of what went on around me is forgotten, but certain details remain and the overall memory is as clear as a bell. We went sledding on the hill behind the house, now overgrown with bushes. My dad rode with me and helped me steer. We strung popcorn and cranberry garlands and I learned that they are very hard to thread without the needle splitting them. My father made a beautiful star for the top of the tree out of an aluminum pie plate. (Anyone remember that they used to emboss a star shape on some pie plates for just that purpose?) I got to push around my grandmother’s old fashioned carpet-sweeper. We discovered the secret stairway that leads from the upstairs bedrooms directly to the downstairs kitchen. The only thing I didn’t care for was that we had to go to Aunt Kathleen’s church on Christmas morning, before we were allowed to open any presents.

Ah, presents. I recall two in particular. The first was a picture puzzle of the United States, the same country I had just crossed for the first time. I lay with my cheek to the rough wool carpet and tried to imagine flying over my puzzle. The second was a big picture book of birds. I sat on the couch and poured over drawings of brilliantly-colored hummingbirds and exotic tropical fowl that I would never in my life see in person. Fifty years gone by and I can still remember the joy of those gifts. It was the perfect Christmas.

A couple of years ago, I had a discussion about Christmas with my good friend, Jim Phelps. He was having a hard time getting excited about the season at all and feeling rather cynical. It was then that I had an epiphany: As adults, we spend a great deal of time trying to relive the Christmases of our childhood, like that one in Simsbury. We cook and bake and shop and decorate and throw money at the holiday as if we can bribe it into being magical again. But I think the reason we fail is simple: When you are small, Christmas just happens.

Think about it. Thanksgiving is over and your only task as a kid is to make construction paper Christmas cards for your parents. Then school closes down for winter break and everything gets set in motion. The tree appears and you get to hang ornaments on it. Your dad plays his old Christmas albums on the phonograph and the sound of the Dartmouth college glee club fills the air. There are cookies to eat and candy canes to lick. You go to church on Christmas Eve, watch a Nativity pageant and hold a candle while singing “Silent Night.” When you wake up the next morning, there are stockings to explore, more good things to eat, and an orgy of presents to unwrap and then play with. And whether or not Santa Claus actually contributed to any of the largesse, you have no other responsibility other than to enjoy.

You didn’t pay for the tree (always surprisingly more expensive than the year before), nor did you wrestle it into the impossible tree stand. You didn’t bake the cookies, roast the turkey, or slave over the hors d’oeuvres. You didn’t shop for hours, fill the stockings, or wrap the presents. You didn’t drive everyone around in the slushy snow or build the manger for the church. It all just happened – a Christmas miracle as far as you are concerned.

It’s not surprising that we can’t recapture all that as grown-ups. The best we can do is to go through the preparation, just like our parents, and experience the result vicariously through our children’s eyes. Now that my daughter is in high school, even that aspect is gone.

Someday, I’d like to try an experiment that might seem sacrilegious. I want to travel to a snowy winter resort and spend Christmas there. I won’t hang lights, I won’t cook or clean or entertain or feed the pets or add water to the tree stand each day. I won’t try to unclog the kitchen drain on Christmas morning (a regular tradition at the Clark household). I won’t wrap or tie bows or worry about taking out the trash or taking down the tree.

Instead, I’ll enjoy the decorations in the hotel lobby and the holiday music being piped over the sound system. I’ll go for long walks and watch everyone else bustling to and fro. Then, the day before Christmas, we will each get a hundred dollar bill and go out shopping. No credit cards allowed and nothing remotely practical is to be bought – books, games, scarves, toys only. Everything is to be wrapped by the store clerks.

Then we will sit down to a gourmet dinner in a local restaurant and drink as much as we want before toddling back to our room to dream of sugar plums and Santa Claus. The following morning, we will open presents in bed and, much later, enjoy the hotel’s complimentary breakfast buffet.

That, to me, might go a long way to recapturing the feeling of being five again. Christmas will, once more, just happen around me. And if the hotel staff are kind enough to let me play with their carpet sweeper in the lobby, well, then everything will be perfect.