Christmas 1952

The graying December sky and a rare trip to church this morning bring to mind Christmases so long ago to me now that they are almost just a whisper in time.
By December 12 (today) we would be well into the gathering excitement of the season.
The big Sears and Montgomery Wards catalogs arrived early with a hint of what was on the horizon.
Coming home from my cousins’ on Thanksgiving Day in the late afternoon, would find the fire department in Brunswick, Maine stringing fir garlands woven with colored lights across the width of Maine St. Santa Claus would have already made an appearance, standing in a cardboard chimney mounted on the back of a Treworgy’s furniture store pick-up truck, as he cruised the streets of town, tossing candy to the kids who lined the way. The store itself would have been transformed. The basement would have found the customary beds and mattresses hidden away to replaced by a toy department with the Big Guy himself sitting on an elevated chair at the far end, awaiting the horde of over-stimulated, runny nosed kids standing in line out onto the sidewalk. Christmas was here!
On Maine Street, the windows were decorated with ornaments, merchandize and snowflakes stenciled from Glass Wax window cleaner. Woolworth’s and Grant’s expanded their toy departments to include anything any kid could want, and the Firestone Store at the end of the street advertised new, shiny bicycles, Flexible Flyers, and sports equipment.
Early in the season we would drive down to Harpswell, which in those days, was driving out into the country and hike through the dense thickets off High Head Road (now Mountain Road) and drag out of the frozen low grounds a spindly fir tree which we would take home and store in the garage. To be Christmas, it could only be balsam fir.
We decorated our classrooms at Longfellow School with paper chains, and snowflakes had drawn names for the party, and soon a Christmas tree would appear in the back corner of each room.
In the afternoon we all gathered around frozen puddles and stumbled between the tufts of grass on our skates or ran and belly flopped onto our sleds to slide across the ice. The sky would become a deep purple as lights came on up and down the street. I used to think of the verse in the Bible about the lion and the lamb lying down together as even the neighborhood bullies became decent for the time, as even the skeptics wanted to make sure they didn’t blow it with Santa Claus.
My first memory of church on Christmas Eve was the candlelight service held at the First Parish Church in Brunswick in 1952. My father had just returned from Germany and his active duty during the Korean War. The church was actually lit by real candles in an event that insurance and fire codes have long since ended. The “big kids” put on the pageant with a reading of the appropriate Bible verses by the dean from Bowdoin College, whose voice, for years, was the sound of Christmas in Brunswick, ME. At the end of the service everyone, even this six year old, was given a candle, with the flame passed from person to person. The congregation filed out to the front of the church and stood on the sidewalk in the lightly falling snow (I remember snow, whether from reality or nostalgia) and sang “Silent Night.” I could not wait until I was old enough to participate in the service.
When the last notes died away, with much “Merry Christmasing,” we all dispersed and came back to our own Christmas tree, with the lights glowing in the darkened room, my father reading the Christmas stories he still reads to his grown grandchildren today, hanging a stocking my mother had dyed red and affixed our names with Elmer’s glue and glitter dust, and wondering if I would ever fall asleep.
Sleep would eventually come and Christmas would pass into another memory.