St. Louis Post-Dispatch

[Reposted]

ALAN writes:

A series of memories dating back many decades of Christmastime in St. Louis include:

The cold, pervasive, mysterious darkness that lay just beyond our living room windows on Christmas Eve nights in the 1950s and that stood in such contrast to the light, the warmth, the laughter, the conversation and the Christmas cheer that filled that room, and to the soothing voices of Bing Crosby, Rosemary Clooney, and Gene Autry on the 78-rpm Christmas records I played at age five while seated on the floor;

My grandfather reacting gratefully and gracefully when he received a modest gift from one of his children; having never expected much from life and being content with the basic necessities, he appreciated even a few simple, utilitarian gifts;

The two, tall, glass-enclosed candles that stood alit on our mantel every Christmas Eve;

The big evergreen Christmas tree in Aunt Lydia’s apartment in 1955 that stood as high as the ceiling;

Christmas visits at the home of cousin Carmella and her family of six children, evenings ending invariably with Christmas cookies and milk and coffee at their kitchen table;

Being taken by my father to see the huge Christmas trees in the lobby of the Missouri Athletic Club and the German House in St. Louis in the 1950s;

Aunt Edith playing caroms and sitting on the floor to play with the electric train under our Christmas tree in 1957;

The sound of conversation during a visit to Aunt Rose’s brother’s family at their home at Christmas 1958, and the sound of her hearty laughter when her two nephews played a new Christmas novelty record called “The Chipmunk Song”, innocent humor from a better time;

Classmate and boyhood pal Jeff coming to visit during the Christmas season and playing with the electric train, moments he remembers today, more than 57 years later;

The tone and texture of Christmas days downtown in the 1950s-‘60s, with the sounds and music and lights and colors of Christmas in civic displays and department store windows, and crowds of shoppers and visitors and families with children, still guided by a longstanding code of moral and cultural standards;

Watching the 1938 motion picture version of “A Christmas Carol” with Gene Lockhart and Reginald Owen, shown on late-night television in St. Louis every Christmas season in the 1950s-‘60s;

The story of “The Star of Bethlehem” presented in December 1963 at the St. Louis Planetarium, featuring traditional religious, historical, and astronomical perspectives on the Christmas Star, recounted while scenes of the sky as it may have looked in ancient times were projected on the dome of the Planetarium Star Chamber;

The feeling that lingered on Christmas Eve nights in the quiet hour that followed the departure of a roomful of guests who had filled the house that evening with good Christmas cheer and family togetherness;

Hearing the voice of legendary St. Louis radio broadcaster John McCormick reading Christmas stories on KMOX Radio on Christmas Eve in the 1960s-‘70s;

Dinners on Christmas Day or New Year’s Day at the home of Aunt Leona, high on a hill in southwest St. Louis, with white linen tablecloths and candles and wine glasses on the dining room table, and the sound of conversation, alternately earnest and jovial, throughout the course of dinner and dessert, punctuated by intervals of silent thought or remembrance as the grown-ups talked of people and events out of their past and utterly unknown to the little boy seated there with them;

…where her good taste in home decoration lived in counterpoint with Uncle Gus’s down-to-earth frankness; where a cluster of colorful Christmas ornaments stood on her coffee table along with a dish of mints;

…where conversation and laughter were the only sounds throughout dinner and dessert, an unspoken rule upheld by people who knew that any extraneous sounds would have shattered that setting; by people who did not require extraneous sounds, gadgets, or amusements to fill that setting because they knew that it would be filled to capacity by the character, the memories, the stories, the imagination, and the conversation brought to that table by each person there; I can imagine what they would say—Uncle Gus especially, in his characteristic plain-spoken, brutally-candid manner—about American families today who don’t do those things at the dinner table because they cannot speak sensibly, have no capacity for imagination, and know little or nothing of their family history, and who therefore use hip gadgets and screens to fill that vacuum and create the illusion of substance where there is none;

…and where every now and then during a moment of silence created by a lull in conversation at the dining room table, we would hear the quiet chimes of the anniversary clock that they kept as the centerpiece on the mantel in their living room, a sound signifying that the hours were hastening on, although it didn’t seem that way to that little boy while spending all afternoon and evening all dressed up and the youngest one there.

“For lo! the days are hastening on…..” are words we hear in the 1849 Christmas carol “It Came Upon the Midnight Clear”.

And indeed the days did hasten on, and then the years, and then the decades….an inevitability wholly unimaginable to that little boy.

What is memory?

It is “Possibly the most precious of our possessions.  The repository for the jewelry of our past, to which each of us has the single key.”

                        — Actor Ronald Colman, in a May 1955 episode of television’s “The Halls of Ivy”

It is especially at this time of year that those jewels become uppermost in my awareness.

Steve Allen wrote in one of his books that he had never felt any emotion more intensely than gratitude.  The same is true for me.  And such gratitude is what I owed many times over to all those good people for all these unforgettable memories that they made possible, a repository of jewels beyond price.

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