Asheville, N.C. - 2020
The Christmas season is here. When I get out our decorations, play the familiar Christmas CD’s and think of all the different places where I have lived in my life, it is the Vermont Christmases that I miss the most.
Buenos Aires, Argentina – 1950 to 1957
The spindly, pine tree in a rusty pot stayed in the corner of our walled in back garden all year long. In December, summer in Buenos Aires, Pedro, our gardener, would carry the tree into the living room. We decorated it for Christmas with homemade ornaments, plain round balls, and lots of tinsel to fill in the open gaps between branches. The potted pine lasted for the seven Christmases of my childhood in Buenos Aires. Looking back, the tree was pitifully small and the weather always hot and muggy, but that never lessened our excitement for the holiday.
Throughout the year we kids would spend hours looking through the thick Sears & Roebuck and Montgomery Ward catalogs’ toy section. This was our window shopping in a place where there wasn’t much to buy. Mother and Dad ordered all our presents from the catalogs weeks in advance and they were shipped to Argentina and delivered to the US Embassy.
Christmas morning we’d be up early and head downstairs to find our gifts piled around the tree. By 8 a.m., they’d all be opened, and the boys would be playing with new toys. Mother was in the kitchen preparing breakfast as she let the maids go for the day. By 11 a.m. we’d all be worn out just as the day was heating up. Dad would suddenly lose his patience with the chaos and the mess of wrappings. He’d get out the ornament boxes, take down the decorations on the tree and start the vacuum, declaring loudly “Kids…Christmas is over for another year!”.
Mother packed the picnic basket with sandwiches and drinks, and told us to gather towels and swimsuits. We’d drive off for the rest of Christmas day to the Club Naútico on the Tigre River where we would swim in the muddy water and play on the playground. Mother and Dad sat in beach chairs resting from the commotion of the day. We’d come home tired, take baths, and just as we were going to bed, there would be a drenching thunderstorm. When it eased up we’d drift off to sleep knowing we had had the best Christmas ever. The potted pine tree was back outside on the terrace. When the gardener came to work he rolled it down to the end of the garden where it sat for a year till the following December.
São Paulo, Brazil – 1959 to 1962
The house on Rua Terra Nova in Jardím America, was large. Two stories, it had a high walled garden around it and gate that led to a two car garage. It was an older house with high ceilings built of beige stucco and a double glass front door that rattled when it was opened or closed. The first floor was perfect for entertaining large groups of people which Mother and Dad did frequently during the years we lived in Brazil. The house had a glass enclosed space that had been added next to the living room that Mother called the winter garden. Perhaps she had seen such rooms in decorator magazines or possibly dreamed of houses with a conservatory much like the country homes in England. Now she had her winter garden in Brazil.
Remembering Christmases in São Paulo, I think of the decorated tree that stood in the winter garden. With many strands of lights and much tinsel and shiny ornament balls, it glittered at night and looked magical as it reflected against the glass walls. Unlike Argentina, we had no living pine trees in the tropical back garden. Instead there was a large fig tree and banana plants that produced branches full of green bananas and lots of bougainvillea s growing over and down the high walls. Our Brazilian Christmas tree must have been an artificial one but I don’t remember.
It was in São Paulo, where Mother began the holiday tradition of inviting the people in Dad’s office at the U.S. Consulate to our house on Christmas Eve for cookies and eggnog. She baked dozens of holiday cookies of different kinds. I watched her squeeze the trees, stars, candy canes and other shapes expertly from the cookie press onto the flat cookie sheets. Then I helped decorate them with icing, colored sugar and sprinkles. Cracking the dozens of eggs for the homemade fresh eggnog was always fun. Dad would bring out the liquor and be the “taster” while we children watched.
We would get dressed up in “party” clothes and go downstairs where our house glowed with the Christmas lights and candles on the dining room table laden with delicious sweets. Dad would put the Christmas records on the stereo phonograph. The “office staff” were like family to us. We knew them well and many went to the Club Harmonia, our country club. All the American kids went to the São Paulo Graded School like we did.
Mother always said those gatherings on Christmas Eve helped stave off homesickness for family far away. I remembered that after I was married and spent Christmases abroad far from my family.
Santiago, Chile – 1975 to 1978
“It’s almost Christmas,” I said to Art, who was now my husband, on our first Christmas in Santiago. “Let’s go out and look for a tree to buy and bring home to decorate.”
“ Sure, you can get one,” he replied. “I’ve never had one before, but I don’t mind if you buy one.”
That was my Jewish husband’s response. We had fallen in love, married, and were now in “a mixed marriage” – Jewish and Unitarian. That first December I realized that we were going to have to work out how we would celebrate holidays. The importance of Christmas in my family was never a religious one but it was the one holiday we celebrated each year no matter where we lived in the world. I couldn’t fathom not having Christmases anymore. I hadn’t imagined I’d be preparing for it with Art watching from the sidelines. Our first year together I did that.
I bought a small, live tree probably at the feria or market where we shopped near our apartment on Avenida Pocuro. Having little money to spend, I made paper chains and bought a box of Christmas balls and strung popcorn. Art sat on the sofa and watched me with interest put it together. I had my Christmas tree and I was happy. I don’t recall how we celebrated that first year except perhaps with one of my not-so-memorable home cooked meals (I had just learned to cook) prepared in our medieval kitchen of our fourth floor apartment. I was a newlywed and married life was full of wonderful possibilities.
“Are we going to get a s tree this year?” Art asked on our second Christmas in Santiago. I was taken by surprise but pleased.
“Sure,” I replied,
“Good,” he said. “I’ll help you pick one out at the feria.”
No more was said as I realized my Jewish husband was “hooked” on picking out and decorating a tree. I soon learned that he loved all classical Christmas music and played our CD’s throughout the season every year.
It helped that throughout our 45 year marriage we never lived geographically close to the Jewish side of the family and so we had the freedom to celebrate as we liked. We have always enjoyed beautiful Christmas trees in most places we’ve lived.
Other Christmases….
It would take a book to write about the Christmas adventures Art and I have had in our life together. Christmases in Huntsville, Alabama always included Mother and Dad. Once or twice we traveled to Hilton Head and Asheville for Christmas with them. There were special Christmases in Princeton, NJ in the picturesque stone caretaker’s cottage we lived in on the Princeton Day School campus. The highlight in Princeton was the special service of carols at the large, gothic Princeton University Chapel so reminiscent of European cathedrals. Living abroad we took holiday trips such as the Christmas we trekked through the bamboo forests of Northern Thailand and the three-week adventure to India from Manila where we were living..
Art’s family didn’t celebrate Christmas and so we would visit at other times during the year. Lighting the Chanukah candles became part of our holiday when Hayden went to Sunday school at the Reform Synagogue in Huntsville. I baked challah and made the latkes and each year. Hayden told everyone he had the best of all worlds getting presents for Chanukah and Christmas.
Rochester, Vermont – 1990 – 2011
We bought our house at Gt. Hawk Mountain and named it Hawkcrest in November 1990 where we spent our first snowy Vermont Christmas there as a family. In our excitement of buying our first home we had not checked out details of heat and many other things that we should have asked about. Instead, we stood on the upper deck looking at the spectacular view of the Green Mountains across the valley and fell in love with the place. Mom and Dad were with us on that first Christmas at Hawkcrest, as we huddled by the big stone fire place in front of a roaring fire which sucked the heat out of the rest of the rooms that had baseboard electric heaters. It took some years of practice and a changeover to a gas furnace to be ready for the Vermont winters.
Our Great Hawk house had an acre of land and was a gravel road with very few cars passing by. It was far from a big town so that there was no hum of traffic in the background, no airplanes flying overhead, and a magnificent star filled skies at night.
Hawkcrest did not become our primary residence until 1995 and even then, we were not to live there full time except for the years we worked in Vermont while Hayden was at the University of Vermont and when we retired permanently in 2009.
It is Vermont and the house on that mountain, that I am the most nostalgic for during the holidays. It will forever be the picture book perfect Christmas place. I can see the snow coming down on our upper deck as I look out the southwest facing windows at the changing winter scene across the valley. I hear the favorite CD’s playing with the familiar holiday music including the complete Messiah (Art’s favorite which he just got out this week) I smell the aroma of baked cookies coming from my tiny one counter kitchen and revel in the lights on our tree when it gets dark around 4:30 p.m. I see the packages under the tree with labels from our favorite Simon store in Montreal where we bought our best Christmas gifts.
I can still feel the excitement, anticipation and anxiety waiting for family to arrive. Travel to the remote village of Rochester in winter was not easy. We made many hour and a half and two hour drives on snowy roads to meet airplanes at Burlington Airport or Manchester Airport in New Hampshire or the bus terminal in Lebanon, NH for anyone coming via Boston. Once or twice Hayden missed planes or they were delayed and we even had to spend the night in Burlington. Megan came often from California and Minnesota and became part of our family during her college and graduate school years and even after she married and lived in Boston.
Looking back on those special Christmases in Vermont, I think about my childhood longing for the "America" I saw in pictures but didn’t know. The Vermont winter scenes were exactly like the quintessential American Christmas cards I had seen as a child and the illustrations in picture books that were read to me. Houses with wreaths and sparkling lights on white perfect snowy landscapes. These were scenes I had never experienced growing up in South America. It was in Vermont, many years later, that those pictures became part of my real life and where I finally had a sense of belonging and connection that I have not felt anywhere else in the world. It is those feelings and memories that come back to me strongly during this Christmas season.
Loved reading these vignettes of Christmases past and seeing the old photos. Does make me nostalgic for our Rochester christmases. Looking forward to making some more new memories with Austin Asheville this time around. Thanks for capturing all these memories so well!
ReplyDeleteLoved reading these vignettes of Christmases past and seeing the old photos. Does make me nostalgic for our Rochester christmases. Looking forward to making some more new memories with Austin Asheville this time around. Thanks for capturing all these memories so well!
ReplyDelete