Christmas trauma

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Everyone has different memories of Christmas. Mine are traumatic. It wasn’t that my sister and I didn’t get gifts. We did. Although my parents were of modest means, we pretty much received anything we wanted (although, the gifts we asked for were as modest as their income).

One obviously couldn’t purchase gifts online in those days before the computer changed everything. To this day, I don’t know how they were able to carry the gifts home — my folks didn’t own an automobile for a large part of my childhood — or how they managed to sneak them into our home without our seeing them? Mother had only one prohibition when it came to which gifts we could receive. These were in the days before political correctness made parents believe that receiving a toy gun for Christmas was equivalent to training your child to become a mass murderer. Mom couldn’t abide toy drums.

It was not that Mom was against her children becoming musicians. She rather liked music — her favorite tunes being patriotic songs, all the traditional Christmas songs and a tune for which she exhibited unusual fondness called “On a Slow Boat to China.” However, mom was smart enough to know that a toy drum in the hands of a child could be a terrible thing.

Thus it was that one Christmas turned especially traumatic. My Aunt Ange, a warm person without a malicious bone in her body, gave yours truly a toy drum. Auntie apparently had not sought the advice of my mother before purchasing the gift. I must say I took to that toy drum with all of the enthusiasm of Gene Krupa. I was really into one of those drum solo riffs when my mother snatched it away from me and put her foot through it. Apparently my ego was as fragile as that drum, for I never took up a musical instrument again and for that matter, while I love jazz, cannot abide until this day, one of those long drum solos.

I don’t want to give you the impression that I had a strict child-rearing. It does appear, though, that Christmas brought out the tyrannical side of my lovely parents. While we had a fresh Christmas tree every year, we were not allowed to participate in trimming the plant. Tree decoration was as strictly my father’s province as gift-buying was my mother’s. Dad took great pride in decorating the tree. He placed each Christmas ball and strand of tinsel with the exactitude of a screw being tightened on a NASA spacecraft. None of us were allowed to join in. The one season that Mom convinced him to make an exception for me, I never got beyond placing the first strand of tinsel on the tree (actually I flung a bunch of the silvery stuff at the tree with great abandon). It was probably the last time I acted with any sort of abandon in our house and certainly the last time that I became involved in trimming the Christmas tree.

Dad used to decorate the bottom of the tree with a wind-up train. Although the wind-up train was designated as mine, I was not allowed to place it on the tracks, let alone wind it up for a ride. Dad was the only engineer allowed to drive that train. Side note: My wife and I still have the same wind-up train, now 76 years old, and I lost interest in wanting to wind it up a long time ago. I often wondered why we couldn’t get a set of Lionel electric trains like some of my other relatives. I never got an answer. Our family didn’t acknowledge the advent of electricity when it came to trains.

I was in my teens by the time we were allowed to have electric lights on the tree. My parents did not believe that one should put electric lights on a live tree. Fire hazard, you know. Somewhere in my teens, Dad had a come-to-Jesus moment regarding the use of tree lights. Suddenly, one season our tree lit up like all the other trees in our family. At that moment, I felt much the same way Benjamin Franklin must’ve felt when he flew his kite on that lightning-filled night. Dad made sure that the lights were lit for only a few hours because otherwise the tree might dry out and a conflagration would surely follow. He was the one who made certain the Christmas tree lights were turned out before we left the house. Dad also made sure to point out the grim lesson of not obeying fire safety rules whenever the news would dutifully report a tragic house fire during the holidays. I still feel a little trepidation about the electric lights shining so brightly on our own live tree today.

It was OK to greet someone by saying “Happy Holidays” back then without feeling that you were undermining Christianity, especially since we lived in a Jewish neighborhood. In fact, there is a song called “Happy Holiday” that was popular back then — written by Irving Berlin — and sung by Bing Crosby in the film “Holiday Inn.” Nobody grew traumatic about the song. It was one of the few things we didn’t get traumatic about then. 

Contact the South Philly Review at editor@southphillyreview.com.

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