Christmas memories real gifts
The Christmas season is the most tradition-rich time of the year. Caroling on winter nights, hanging ornaments on the Christmas tree, attending the children’s pageant at church, stuffing stockings full of Santa’s surprises, gathering for the holiday meal . . . these and many other traditions make Christmas a very special time of year. In today’s column, which was originally published in 2000 as the first of a three-part series, Glenn Tunney’s readers share their favorite memories from Christmases gone by.
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Mrs. McMichael hesitated, if only for a second, then dumped the entire contents of a second box of soap flakes into the big metal pot. She vigorously stirred them into the already milky white water as her husband Ken looked on approvingly.
“That should make a fine glazing,” he told her.
She continued to beat the thickening lather until it took on the texture of whipped cream. When it had reached the proper consistency, the couple began to apply the white frosting to the boughs of a tall evergreen tree that graced the entry hall of Brownsville’s Prospect Street School. They carefully worked their homemade “snow” around the blue lights they had already arranged on the tree, daubing the foam on each branch until the pine tree appeared to have weathered a fresh snowfall.
Mrs. McMichael stepped back a few steps to admire their handiwork. Her husband, who had disappeared momentarily, now returned from the basement where he had been stoking the fire in the school’s big furnace.
“It really looks beautiful,” Ken said.
“It took a lot of our ration stamps for the soap,” his wife replied, but she was pleased with the results. “It’s worth it. Oh, won’t the children ‘ooh’ and ‘ah’ when they see it!”
One first grader who gazed in awe at the magnificent frosted tree was a little girl named Hannah Millward.
“It seemed gigantic to me,” Hannah Millward Fisher told me recently. “All of the classes came out into the central hall of Prospect Street School to sing Christmas carols. World War II was under way and everything was rationed, but custodian Ken McMichael and his wife had used their own money and ration stamps to ice and decorate the tree. It was beautiful.”
It is one of Hannah’s fondest memories of Christmas. This holiday season, some of my readers have shared with me their favorite memories of Christmases past. Today and in my next two articles, I will share some of them with you.
Nowadays the religious significance of the holiday struggles to maintain its place of importance as the buying, wrapping and receiving of Christmas presents often receives the lion’s share of attention. Yet I have noticed that a number of my readers’ favorite memories are not centered around gifts, but instead around just being with family and enjoying the camaraderie of friends and relatives. Many of the readers whose memories I will share with you, all natives of the area, no longer live near Brownsville or in western Pennsylvania. Their holiday memories of the town as they remember it and how they celebrated the season are simple and poignant.
“Boy, there’s so much I remember about Christmases past,” says Russ Moorhouse, an area native who now calls Stevensville, Md., home. “Thanks to an uncle who was an avid home movie taker, I have many of those memories, now preserved on videotape, that I can still watch today. Watching them, I feel a mixture of emotions, since many of the relatives and friends of the family in those movies are now deceased. But they were joyous times for me in the early fifties, when friends and family got together and visited one another, instead of holing up in their homes and watching television.”
Phyllis Grossi of Phoenixville, Pa., lived at 1400 Second St. with her parents, Phillip and Kathryn Barreca. She agrees that family and friends made the holiday special.
“Everyone in our area would be excited to get all dressed up on Christmas Eve and go to the midnight Mass,” Phyllis remembers. “Then we would come back home, where relatives would be visiting and all the goodies were brought out to munch on. The neighbors in my area of Second Street would visit back and forth.
“On Christmas morning, the smell of cooking and baking would be coming from the kitchen while we were all looking at our gifts. Usually we got a doll, maybe a dress and a stocking with fruit and candy, but to us that was the greatest.”
West Brownsville native Sherman Elias, now of White Oak, is Jewish, and he fondly recalls the holiday season as a time when he shared his Christian friends’ traditions.
“As a young boy growing up in West Brownsville, I had a very good friend, Bill Sorenson, with whom I spent Christmas Eve for many years. I am of the Jewish faith, but I enjoyed helping the Sorensons trim their tree. It really was a family affair, and I was pleased to be part of it. Mr. and Mrs. Sorenson (Dan and Gay) were beautiful people and I just blended in.
“After we trimmed the tree, we would end up at the Paladium, which was above the post office in West Brownsville. No one had a better time than we all did. The Paladium was the place to go for dancing, and the kids came from all around. I don’t recall how much it cost to get in, but there was an admission fee. No hard drinks, just Cokes and burgers.
“After that, we went back to Bill’s house and I always slept there on Christmas Eve. On one occasion, we even went to a midnight service in one of the churches on Second Street in Brownsville. Brownsville was a wonderful town to grow up in. My boyhood years are very vivid in my mind. I recall standing on the steps inside the Prospect Street School where we all sang carols.”
If anything brings the feeling that Christmas has truly arrived, it is the sound of Christmas carols in the air and a fresh white blanket of newly fallen snow. Shirley Beck Johnson of Pittsburgh grew up on Blainesburg hill, as did I. She moved away to Cleveland as a young woman to find employment. Shirley, who is my cousin, shared with me an experience involving my own family that is her favorite Christmas memory. It is a simple story that captures the special feeling that only Christmas can bring.
“I had lived in Cleveland for a long time,” she remembers, “but I always made it home for Christmas. I haven’t missed one yet. My mother was living in Finleyville by then, but the day after Christmas, my mother, stepfather and I decided to come to Blainesburg to visit aunts and uncles, many of whom still live there.
“We went to your parents’ house first,” Shirley told me, “and visited there for a while. But as I only had one chance a year to visit, I didn’t want to spend all of my time in one place, so I decided I would walk up the hill three blocks to visit my aunt and uncle, Ed and Peg Tunney. Your sister Kathy said she would go too. She and I started out only to discover that while we had been inside, it had snowed quite a lot and nobody had been out in it yet. It was a beautiful, freshly fallen, untouched snow. The night was clear, the stars bright, and although it was cold, it was not bitter and it felt good to be out in it.
“Kathy and I reached Ed and Peg’s and we visited there for a while. Then I said I was going to move on to try to visit more relatives while I could. I said I was going to two other relatives’ homes a few blocks further up Jefferson Avenue. I was amazed when Peggy and Kathy said they would go with me!
“So now there were three of us. We threw on our warm clothing, stepped out into the night, and saw that still no cars had driven over the snow. Ours were the only tracks, and it was a beautiful winter night. And so we spontaneously decided to sing Christmas carols as we walked. We sang everything we knew! We went to the next two stops, visited each relative for a while, and guess what? My aunts Ruth and Pearl, in turn, both decided to join us as we walked on to visit two more relatives’ homes in Blainesburg. Now we were a group of five, still singing as we walked in the starlit snow. It was such a high! I can’t describe how wonderful it felt.
“We finally made it the five or six blocks to my Uncle Earl’s and then to my brother’s house. I wasn’t able to participate in the walk back, as by that time my mother and stepfather had come to fetch me to go back to Finleyville, but I believe the others all walked back as we had come, still singing carols and just enjoying being together in God’s beautiful world.
“I had such a wonderful time that evening. The actual physical closeness of my family, all living in the same community which made that kind of evening possible, and the emotional closeness of people who would want to do that. That is one of my most precious Christmas memories.”
Readers, I invite you to join me here again next week, when I will share more of my readers’ favorite Christmas memories.
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Comments about these articles may be sent to Editor Mark O’Keefe, 8-18 E. Church St., Uniontown, PA or e-mailed to mo’keefe@heraldstandard.com .