My Father's Christmas

My father’s favorite holiday was Christmas. It officially began in our house on December 6—St. Nicholas Day. Upon waking, my brother and I would find two socks hung on the stair rail overlooking our modest living room. The socks usually were Dad’s dress socks, well worn, sometimes with a hole in the toe or heel, and strung up haphazardly with twine.

Inside each sock was my Dad’s idea of a joke—maybe two potatoes complete with eyes or a few crooked carrots and a penny or two. If he could have found coal, it would have been in there as well. When it came to Christmas, my father was very influenced by the two Ds—Dickens and the Depression.

But my brother and I both knew that the frugality of St. Nicholas Day, only meant that Christmas Day would be that much sweeter.

There was always a real tree, at least until the advent of artificial trees. My father insisted it wasn’t Christmas unless the piney scent of a tree wafted through the house. He favored the long needled pine, which he thought gave best advantage to the ornaments and the strings of bubble lights that as a child I’d stare at with fascination as they heated and bubbled their rich ambers, greens, reds and blues.

My earliest memory of trimming the tree was at age five. My brother hadn’t been born yet, so I bore the brunt of my father’s Christmas mania. I have a distinct memory of sitting at the kitchen table with an enormous bowl of freshly popped corn in front of me that I wished would disappear. In my one hand I held a thick needle attached to heavy thread that I imagined could suture a rhino’s hide, and in my other hand I held a fragile kernel of popcorn.

No matter how hard I tried, as many times as I successfully threaded a kernel, just as many times I stabbed my finger or broke the popcorn, disappointing my father.

So by the time my brother was old enough to string corn, my father abandoned popcorn chains and turn his meticulous attention to tinsel and trains.

Under my father’s unrelenting gaze, my brother and I had to, strand by strand, delicately place the tinsel on the tree. It was to hang just so, giving the appearance of icicles.

Of course, as my brother and I grew older and bolder, whenever my father’s back was turned, we’d toss handful of tinsel all over the tree until he finally lost his temper and exiled us from the tree trimming, which had been our intention all along.

Sadly, with the advent of artificial trees, my mother, a compulsive neat freak, insisted we get one. For years, my father fought her, until she wore him down. But his surrender was not without a small victory. He brought home what I like to call his anti-Christmas tree—a white, glittery concoction that looked like it should come with a strobe light and disco boots.

Not to be deterred, my father exacted his revenge for the loss of the piney Christmas trees, with the train that ate our basement. The train started small and simply, a single track circling the Christmas tree. There was one engine, maybe six cars, a black transformer with a lever that controlled the train. Even at five, I was allowed to fit the track together and play with the lever.

But each Christmas, my father’s notion of a proper train grew until “the train” took up half our basement. Set up on a long, rectangular sheet of plywood supported by two sawhorses, there were several trains, multiple transformers, engines with lights, coal cars, passenger cars, cabooses, towns, hills and bridges, trees with fake snow and townspeople. It was unbelievable, and it was Christmas.

Least I forget the outside—my father strung lights on all the bushes and trees and along the eaves of the house, even the statue of the Blessed Virgin with hands folded in prayer held a string of light. And for a while a lighted, life-size, plastic Santa stood next to our front door, letting everyone in the neighborhood know that this was the Christmas house.

After I got married and moved to another state, my father started putting up two Christmas trees—one in the living room and one in the finished basement. Now resigned to the world of artificial trees, neither tree was real, but at least they were green.

By then he’d lost interest in the train, but not Christmas. Whenever I came home for the holidays, my father would decorate the basement as if it was a Christmas store. There’d be strings of lights around the walls and over pictures; the bar would have garlands and tinsel all over it, and always along the top of one wall would be a sign welcoming us home for the holidays.

So when my father was dying in late fall of 1996, he hung on until December 20, which we all thought was his intention. And as if honoring that intention, my mother decided to hold his funeral the day after Christmas.

Standing at the lectern in the church, my brother started my Dad’s eulogy by turning around and pointing at the Christmas decorations—the Christmas trees, the poinsettias, the lights, and the wreaths.

“Dad would have loved this,” he began. “At Christmas, if it didn’t move he decorated it.”

In loving memory of my Dad.