Dear Readers,
One day late, I wish you all a Merry Christmas, and I thank you, as always, for reading. Those thanks, each month, are not openly stated, but they are always present in the care and love I take writing to you.
This is our second covid Christmas. In France, we’re still wearing masks and we’re still required to show our “sanitary passport” when we enter restaurants, bars or theaters. Many restrictions remain and when I go out masked, I look at the world through the fog on my glasses. I’ve tried everything to get rid of it, but nothing works.
Seen that way, the present looks murky. Time, then, to look back to Christmas past…
Mrs. Davenport is in charge of celebrations at Jackson Street School. Miss Holahan, our teacher, herds us into a classroom where the window shades are pulled down. She instructs us to sit two to a bench at those old-fashioned desks with a hole for an inkwell on top. Shh! Stop the whispering! Mrs. Davenport, our principal, has threaded the film into the projector. The show begins with a whir, then a crackle, then “The Spirit of Christmas” is on the portable screen mounted for the festivities.
Each Christmas, from kindergarten to fifth grade, we watch the Mabel Beaton Marionettes perform the story of the Nativity and Clement Moore’s 1823 poem “Twas the Night Before Christmas.” We never get bored, we never cry out for a remake or a sequel. Each year, we are enchanted to watch the same film and still today, watching it on my computer, I feel the wonder I felt as a child. If you’d like to watch too, here’s the AT&T version at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2OB0Lf5CKDM .
On Centre Street, every store is decorated for the holidays, and Pomeroy’s Department Store, just like Wanamaker’s at City Hall in Philadelphia or Macy’s on Herald Square in New York, has its windows filled with music and animated decorations that we children love. But there are other sights to take in. One of my other personal favorites is the life-sized white horse in the window of Knapp’s Leather Goods, wearing a wreath for the season. Inside, the decorations are sober, but that store does not need much to convince me to enter.
First of all, there’s the scent of leather. Then there are the well-stocked glass and wooden display cases. Each year I hope for a gift—a bookbag, a shoulder bag, a wallet—with initials embossed in gold. Best of all, there is Mrs. Knapp herself, who welcomes customers to her store. In fifth grade, my wish comes true. My Aunt Mildred gives me a red-leather book bag with a buckle-down flap. When I open it, I am greeted by my name in gold.
A few steps from Knapp’s, temptation looms large. I don’t dare enter Mootz’s Candies. I only have a few pennies and there’s no penny candy in there. I stand in the street like a waif, drooling in front of the display window at all those sweets. In French, window-shopping is called “lèche-vitrine,” window-licking, and that is just what I want to do. I love the barley-sugar lollipops—or clear-toy candy suckers as we call them, clear red, green and gold, in the shape of Saint Nick, a church bell or a Christmas tree.
I also love the candy crabapples attached to a wooden stem. They are red and yellow on the outside, but become white as I suck to the core. Of course, I must not forget the peanut rolls: a creamy-white center dipped in dark chocolate and then rolled in chopped peanuts. One of my childhood dreams is to have a pound box all to myself!
I love to go Christmas shopping with my Aunt Mildred, a principal herself, of Yorkville School. She does not drive, so when we are loaded down with packages, we drop them at the office of the taxi dispatcher at Centre and Norwegian Streets, where everyone knows my aunt. Nor does she like to cook, which means our shopping expedition ends in the dining room of the Necho Allen Hotel. I order a Wimpy and have Neapolitan ice cream for dessert.
I come from a family of working women. My mother is a teacher too and does not have much time for baking though she always makes a few batches of her specialty, Toll House chocolate-chip cookies. Each year our Aunt Nan brings us a tin of Michigan Rocks, a cookie that sets off waves of speculation in my young mind. I want to understand the origin of such a name and even see—or imagine—a blue Michigan rock stamped on each cookie. Otherwise, why call them that?
There is also a distinctive flavor, one I’m not sure I like. It’s the flavor of black walnuts, a “perfumy” taste, my mother says, much stronger than that of the “normal” walnuts my mother keeps in a green glass bowl for the holidays, along with almonds, hazelnuts, pecans and Brazil nuts. Next to the bowl, we keep a silver nutcracker. Part of the fun of eating is cracking each shell to get to the nut.
On TV, we always watch a performance of Tchaikovsky’s “Nutcracker Suite.” This is before the creation of the Schuylkill County Ballet Theater, whose dancers put on their own “Nutcracker” each year. I love the music and the dancing and go to bed, just like the children in “Twas the Night Before Christmas,” with sugarplum fairies dancing in my head.
Today, I miss those Christmases past. I miss Pottsville and Pennsylvania and the state’s rich heritage of Christmas traditions: the Moravian star, kielbasa from Shenandoah, the Polish Wigilia, the Lithuanian Kucios, the Pennsylvania Dutch Belsnickel, even some of the nation’s first Christmas trees, a German tradition brought to North America.
So I drink a cup of kindness to auld lang syne, while wishing you many more merry Christmases and a happy New Year 2022! Think of me on New Year’s Day when you dig into your first helping of pork and sauerkraut. Bonne Année!
