My sisters and I have very few photographs of our family and of our home at Christmas time. What we have are memories. I have the barest glimpse of a memory of one Christmas in California before I turned five, but what I remember of that event are the lights along the highways and the Christmas decorations along the streets as we drove to visit family? Friends?
I remember Christmas in Germany. We lived in an apartment that we shared with my grandparents who slept there at night but spent their daytime hours in an efficiency behind their store located on the bottom floor. My mother and grandmother put up the tree on Christmas Eve while my oldest sister, Liz, took our two younger sisters and me to the Christkindl Market in Nurnberg. It was a different place and time, and a twelve-year-old was considered old enough to take small children across town on the city’s trolleys. We rarely had money to spend, but some Christmases we had enough to buy Lebkuchen or a hot drink. The real wonder of Christmas started after we returned home.
The tree was decked with hundreds of tinsel strands that my mother had painstakingly hung two or three strands at a time. All the ornaments were German or Hungarian blown glass more beautiful than any decorations one finds in stores today. The lights- individual candles attached to the tips of the branches. What a glorious sight! We never saw electric lights until we moved to America. The trees I remember are the trees we had while living in Germany.
All of us children received presents but usually only one or two. Every doll I cherished as a child was given to me as a Christmas gift. I kept them for years. My dolls were more than playthings. They were my friends. They loved me, comforted me and never hurt me. One year, instead of a doll I received a stuffed bunny with a plastic face. After a momentary twinge of disappointment, I named her “Bunny,” and she too joined my circle of doll friends.
Some years we also received a new dress, jacket or mittens. Mother made many of our clothes. She was a professional seamstress, so the things that she sewed were often prettier and more well-made than store-bought clothes. When she could not afford new fabric, she repurposed the material from old skirts and dresses handed down by my grandmother or my aunt.
What I loved best about Christmas Eve were the cookies, the chocolate and the nuts and fruit we each received. There was always a chocolate St. Nickolas and oranges. As an adult, I still associate oranges with Christmas.
That was Christmas then. With all the wonder that only a child can experience I was enthralled. I never realized how poor we were, and it never mattered. It was Christmas, a magnificent time of the year.
dottieriley 