The John Hancock Life Insurance Christmas Carol Booklet

[Reposted]

“TALES OF CHESTER” continues here with a few words from my husband, A. Wood, on the season of Advent:

EVERY self-respecting kid in Chester was a school resister, possessing an instinctive and deeply-rooted sense of the dignity of human freedom. But Sonny Trenjic [pronounced TRENCH-ick] raised the art of dodging school to a new level.

One day in early December, Sister St. Reginald (they called her “Reggie”) asked Sonny’s sister, Babe, why he was absent from his eighth-grade class. Babe said that a terrible mishap had occurred at home. Sonny was conducting an extra-curricular science experiment. He was attempting to electrocute a spider — for the greater cause, of course — and the spider bit him, seriously injuring his hand.

           In the annals of truancy, this was a dazzling masterpiece.

But, even artistry at this exalted level could not disarm the hardened prejudices of Sister Reggie. She stopped what she was doing and left her class in the charge of a student proctor.

She marched to the Trenjic house. She knocked on the door. Without further ado, she snagged the un-injured Sonny by the collar. The fugitive was then escorted back to class. This was all part of a nun’s job profile. She physically, as well as spiritually, battled the forces of evil. The profane waged its ceaseless war with the sacred in the streets and living rooms of this small industrial city by the rat-gray Delaware River. Reggie and the other sisters were the shock troops.

The profane weakened during the four-week liturgical season of Advent. Our small, darkened minds were uplifted with greater frequency to the supernatural as the lamps in row houses brightened the encroaching night. Expectation was in the air. Let’s be clear: It was anticipation, not fulfillment. Thanksgiving was still Thanksgiving. It wouldn’t have remotely crossed our minds to go shopping for Christmas on the day after Thanksgiving. Black Friday was not yet black. We didn’t put up Christmas trees or wreaths during Advent. We didn’t have parties until Christmas week.

As usual, the John Hancock insurance man came to our house on Madison Street weekly to collect payment. (Sometimes my mother was “not at home.”) In the first week of December, he brought us a copy of the John Hancock Life Insurance Christmas Carol Booklet, which could be banged out on the old grand piano in the living room. (The piano had been sent to us in pieces from Germany, a gift from my much-older cousin, Bobby Kerrigan, when he was stationed there with the Army, many years before he tragically took his own life and long after my mother had raised him as an abandoned child.) But other than that, we did not prepare the house for Christmas until the 22nd or 23rd.

Sonny Trenjic aside, we still retained the ancient sense of Advent as a time of anticipation, but also of self-mortification, not festivity.

In first grade, the children at St. Michael’s School took turns bringing in a single item for the class Nativity scene. One day someone would bring in the straw for the crib. Another day it would be a sheep or a donkey.

The ragamuffins on the school choir, who each Sunday sang the Kyrie Eleison and Credo of the High Mass in Latin, not only had to practice at lunchtime, but often convened after school to prepare the Christmas Eve Midnight Mass, which always packed them in, standing-room only. I was on the choir for five full years. Choir practice was a grueling job. During Advent, we would learn an entire Mass especially picked by the choir master — not the Gregorian Mass, but one of the other traditional Masses in song. We also learned many of of the major Christmas hymns, including “When Blossoms Flower’d Amid the Snows” and “It Came Upon a Midnight Clear,” a song I could not unravel in my head (“it came upon a midnight clear” — I had no idea what that meant.)  When it came to the more important hymns or sequences, Sister Clare Regina instructed Louis Helman, who was tone deaf, to “just move your lips.”

We also participated in the more secularized observance of the Christmas season with the choir’s performance of Christmas carols for WBCH, the “Voice of Chester,” with its wooden stage right by City Hall. A different school choir came each day during the weeks before Christmas. The whole St. Michael’s choir would go there one day at lunch time in December. Sister Clare would say beforehand, “We want to be ‘A-Number-One.’” Unfortunately, one of the public school choirs was much better than we were.

On occasion it would snow during Advent. It wasn’t that frequent, but on December 4, 1957, there was a surprise storm and it snowed 7.4 inches.

I will never forget it.

I was in fourth grade. We went to school that morning when it was snowing lightly. It was supposed to be raining, but by mid-morning it was really coming down. We were all suddenly learning-disabled. We were told by the nuns that if we watched the snow, it would stop, a theory unsupported by the evidence and an ineffective deterrent. We still kept our eyes turned to the windows. Finally, at noon, they let us out. Both Miss Connelly, my lay teacher, and Alice McHale, the crossing guard, said to us: “Please, boys and girls, pray that it stops snowing.”

As we passed Mrs. McHale on the slippery sidewalk, all of us, walking in line as usual, prayed that it wouldn’t stop.

A snowstorm was a trip out of Chester, a no-expenses vacation to an entirely different place. The flakes descended on the ugly alleys and rooftops, on the shipyard and the church spires, transforming a place of grit and concrete into an enchanted kingdom, a place where it was easy to believe that a sudden, mysterious event — a thing of unparalleled beauty — could redeem this careworn universe.

As the mystical crystals fell and formed billowy layers, that pervasive sense of anticipation that characterized Advent intensified.

Great things were indeed in store for us.

— Comments —

Patrick O’Brien writes:

I love the Chester stories, as well as the selection you print of a by-gone St. Louis. I turned 70 last summer, and grew up in Chicago, in a neighborhood which is in some ways very much as it was back then, at least demographically. Alas, the Catholic parish is all Vatican II junk, but that is universal in the world of the New Springtime. But my poor grandchildren, growing up in the world of the Antichrist and his Prophet in the Vatican. God save us.

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