A Christmas Potpourri

“Mail your packages early so the post office can lose them in time for Christmas.”

                                                                                              Johnny Carson

Every holiday season the stores offer up Christmas potpourri a fragrance that mixes spices, citrus, berries, evergreen, apples and probably a variety of chemicals.  My daughter loves the stuff.  Loves it to the point that she bought some potpourri spray.  I know this because a few weeks ago she brought over her son Jackson.  I was untangling Christmas lights in the garage and as he waddled in I took a sniff, “What in the hell smells like Christmas?”  Turns out Jackson had got hold of the spray and anointed himself with it.  He smelt like Christmas half a block away.

So what follows is my own Christmas potpourri.  You the reader might find it has a pleasant Christmassy air about it.  Others of you might just think it stinks.  This Christmas offering is a stocking stuffed with historical vignettes and some personal stories and observations.  Or maybe it’s not so much a stocking as a ratty gym sock.  I suppose the reader will be the judge.

(Sources for this post include the books, Christmas in America by Penne Restad and Silent Night by Stanley Weintraub)

A tannenbaum by any other name..:
       An evergreen in the home wasn’t always a symbol of a Christian celebration.  The Romans decorated their homes with evergreens as pagan symbols of fertility and regeneration.  In the early 19^th century the Pennsylvania Dutch introduced Christmas trees to America but there was resistance usually owing to the influence of Calvinism.  That no fun bunch couldn’t stem the popularity of the Christmas evergreen and by the 1830s the tradition of Christmas trees had spread beyond the German community.  

       By the 1840’s Christmas commercialism began in earnest.  In 1840 a woman from New Jersey schlepped some pine trees to New York City to sell along with some hogs and chickens.  By 1843 newspapers in New York were advertising Christmas trees and ornaments for sale.

The hideous aluminum tree

       Franklin Pierce introduced the first White House tree in 1856.
       In the 1950’s and 60’s aluminum Christmas trees were all the rage.  And they were hideous.  I still recall them in all their ugly glory.  The classic A Charlie Brown Christmas alludes to them when Charlie Brown and Linus go tree shopping.  Most of them were silver but pink and blue were not uncommon.

On the American Frontier Christmas was a Spartan holiday.  In 1805 William Clark described Christmas dinner at the mouth of the Columbia River with Meriwether Lewis as consisting of “pore elk so much spoiled that we eat it thro’ mear necessity, some spoiled pounded roots and a fiew fish.”  Fur trader Francis Chardon and his men celebrated Christmas 1836 with a “feast of eatables but no drinkables” and the firing of a few gunshots.

What would Christmas be without Christmas lights?
       One of my personal favorite things to do at Christmastime is to go for a run through the neighborhoods in the early evening; a sort of harrier’s Christmas light tour.
       When my children were younger we would drive through various neighborhoods to see light displays.  We drove through San Francisco, around Union Square, up Nob Hill, along the Marina and into the rich enclave of Seacliff.
       In local El Cerrito a gentleman who hailed from India, Sundar Shadi put up a Nativity display on the hillside grounds of his home.  He would begin working on the figures for his display in September which would be ready for viewing two weeks before Christmas.  It was one of the most popular displays in the Bay Area, a traditional holiday attraction dating back to the 1950s.  Mr. Shadi passed away in 2002 at the age of 101.  For some years the Soroptomist Club, the El Cerrito Fire Department and other dedicated volunteers have maintained the exhibit which is up again this Christmas season.

Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol presents empathy for the poor and working class.  Was this inspired by Dickens’ own life experiences of his father serving time in a London debtor’s prison and Charles himself having to leave school to work in a factory?

Christmas in the slave south while hardly benign was at least a time when slaves would be afforded a break from their labors.  Sara Crocker told of holidays in which the slaves would be able to rest and sleep into the day and eat a big dinner prepared by the whites, with roasted pigs and chickens and demijohns of whiskey.  Solomon Northrup who wrote of his experiences in the book Twelve Years a Slave, told of an open air feast of roasted chickens, ducks, turkeys, pigs, vegetables, biscuits and pies.  A slave in Texas, Charley Hurt recalled that on Christmas the master “puts out a tub of whiskey or brandy in the yard and colored folks helped themselves.”  It was also a time when slaves were given valued gifts of extra provisions or clothing.  Former slave Levi Pollard recalled that slaves received extra flour and rice, a whole ham, 5 pounds of cane sugar and winter clothes.

But for all of those who got a break from the cruelty of everyday life there were those for whom Christmas was just another back breaking day of labor.  One slave recalled that “Christmas was just like any other time with the slaves.  We never had anything extra.” 

It just wouldn't be Christmas without company parties.  You know, those events that spawn everlasting anecdotes about someone who got as lit as a Christmas display and created a ruckus of historic proportions. Over the years my Christmas party experiences have run the gamut from none at all to pretty extravagant (at least by my standards).
       A company that I worked for some years ago, owned by a tight old skinflint, went for years without a party.  He was a rich fellow who squeezed a penny so tight that poor old Abe suffocated.  One year the old bastard came up with the brilliant idea of having a Christmas luncheon….in the conference room.  The meal came complete with turkey…a warmed, pressed turkey breast.  It was a depressing affair in which everyone left their desks, stood in the buffet line, ate at the conference table and made desultory small talk.  After lunch we all shuffled back to our desks.
       There was consolation in the fact that my wife works for Clif Bar which throws lavish parties.  There were two years in which we had dinner and overnight accommodations in the Napa Valley.  One year dinner was served in the aging caves beneath a winery.
       I have a faint recollection of some parties in the 70s when I worked a retail job at a Downtown San Francisco hardware store.  These parties were for the most part pot luck.  Everyone brought a dish and the owners would throw for a turkey or a ham neither of which was the main course.  The main course was alcohol.  One of the more memorable ones was at the store manager’s swank Russian Hill flat.  He had a beautiful white couch right up until the moment that Dan Alonso, the lecherous old locksmith, added some color by vomiting potluck all over it.  It was a Christmas classic.
      Shortly after old Alonso’s historic hurl the store suspended Christmas parties so my housemate Scott and I decided to fill the breach.  I do recall making eggnog which was mostly brandy, or whiskey, or both; I don’t know, I can’t remember.  That was the year that I came up with the brilliant idea of inviting both my just still barely girlfriend Linda and Cora (now my wife) who I had just started taking an interest in.  Luckily neither showed up; it was not my finest hour.  If memory serves this was the party in which our other housemate got out of the trolley down the block and followed the blaring music to our home (this during the wee hours) and opened the door to find Scott and I passed out blissfully oblivious to Led Zeppelin at jackhammer decibel levels.

A yummy holiday treat

I’m one of the few people I know who likes fruitcake.  The trouble with fruitcake is its reputation precedes it.  I’d be willing to bet a big tin of fruitcake that most people who say they hate it and make those slanderous remarks have never sampled the moist, nutty goodness of fruitcake.  But then again I like black licorice too.

Santa Claus has traveled a long way and I don’t mean from the North Pole.  His beginnings go back to St. Nicholas, a monk born around 280 AD who lived in what is now present day Turkey.  Nicholas’ reputation was as a pious fellow who gave away much of his inherited wealth and gave comfort to the sick and the poor.  The name of Santa Claus is a derivation of the nickname Sinter Klass which was a shortened version of Sinter Nikolaas, Dutch for St Nicholas.

Thomas Nast's Santa

After going through several iterations, Thomas Nast a cartoonist for Harper’s Weekly drew the prototype for today’s “jolly old elf.”  Nast’s Santa, one of my favorite versions, might not be entirely PC these days.  Amongst the gifts under his arm the rotund one has a sabre and a belt with a U.S. buckle.  Worst of all Nast’s Santa carries a pipe.  He’s seriously overweight as well; probably too much fast food so he can’t be a suitable role model for children.

It seems that everyone has a list of best ever Christmas films so just for the hell of it here are my top five.

1.       A Christmas Carol (the George C. Scott version)

2.       Home Alone

3.       A Charlie Brown Christmas

4.       It’s a Wonderful Life

5.    Joyeux Noel (about the WWI Christmas truce).

I’m awarding honorable mention to Lethal Weapon which isn’t a Christmas movie per se but has a sort of Christmas subplot.

Finally, it would be hard to find a better of example of the power of the Christmas spirit than the events of 1914 along the Western Front of World War I.  To understand the events of Christmas 1914 it is necessary to understand the circumstances of the soldiers occupying the lines of trenches that stretched from the English Channel to the Alps.  It was a war that was fought with an insane and deadly combination of outdated tactics and modern weaponry.  Life in the trenches was horrific, described by a German as, “lice, rats, barbed wire, fleas, shells, bombs, underground caves, corpses, blood, liquor, mice, cats, artillery, filth, bullets, mortars, fire, steel…the work of the devil.”  In the winter of 1914 the trenches were filled with water and mud, and the area between the trenches, no man’s land, was a barren muddy moonscape littered with the dead and the debris of war. 

        As December 25^th approached the soldiers discovered that they had a commonality; Christmas.  For a short time an unofficial truce took place; a truce unauthorized by high command.  Commanders ordered a cessation of the truce but the commands went, in most cases, unheeded.

       The truce often started on a quiet night when soldiers of one side heard soldiers of the other singing Christmas songs.  Those on the other side often responded with cheers or joined in the singing.  There were shouts of holiday felicitations between the two sides.  The Germans adorned the parapets with candlelit tannenbaums and signs that read, "you no shoot, we no shoot"  Finally a brave soul would stand up on the parapet and approach the other side to work out a Christmas truce.

       In some instances the soldiers traded souvenirs such as uniform buttons and patches.  They also traded food, tobacco and other items of comfort.  Soldiers shared drink such as in one section in which the German side rolled two barrels of beer to the British on the other side.  In another section the two sides met to celebrate mass led by priests from both sides.  Soccer games were held in no man’s land with the trenches on each side serving as sidelines. 

       Wrote British soldier Charles Smith, “We ate their sauerkraut and they our chocolate, cakes, etc.  We had killed a pig just behind our lines.  We cooked the pig in no man’s land sharing it with the Boche (Germans).

       Following a soccer match between the Germans and the British in no man’s land Bob Lowell of the 3^rd London Rifles wrote, “Even as I write, I can scarcely credit what I have seen and done.  It has indeed been a wonderful day.”

       William Dawkins, another British soldier recalled a soccer match in no man's land and an angry lieutenant colonel, "the Germans came out of their protective holes, fetched a football and invited our boys out for a little game. Our boys joined them and together they quickly had great fun till they had to return to their posts.  I cannot guarantee it but it was told to me that our lieutenant colonel threatened our soldiers with machine guns.  Had just one of those big mouths gathered together ten thousand footballs what a happy solution that would have been, without bloodshed."  The big mouths didn't learn then and they haven't learned now.

Merry Christmas and peace on Earth. 

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