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25 Days of Christmas Memories – Day 9

December 9

Sitting on Santa’s lap. Most kids have at least one memory of sitting in Santa’s lap as a child. In Millersburg, Santa made a couple different appearances during the Christmas season. The first time was usually at the tree lighting right after Thanksgiving. Then later on, he’d visit one of the local businesses so that the kids in town could come sit on his lap and tell him what they wanted for Christmas.

Most of my memories of visiting Santa took place at the hardware store. He sat somewhere at the back of the store, and my parents would take my brother and me to see him. There was always a long line, and I always looked at all the things on the shelves as we waited. Most of the items were boring, but I do recall being fascinated by the different sizes of nails in the bins, as well as by the various kinds of hammers. When we finally reached Santa, Gary and I would often both sit on his lap at the same time. Gary always had a list, and one year I recall it being very, very long. My parents chastised him afterwards, but Santa found it amusing and praised Gary’s reading and writing skills. I usually didn’t have a written list, but just listed random things. My parents never had to scold me about listing too many “wants;” they did, however, grumble at me because I always spoke barely above a whisper, and they could never hear what I told Santa. I began to have my suspicions about him after I refused to tell my parents what I’d asked Santa for. I didn’t receive one single thing off my list that year.

Other memories of Santa visits were at my church. He would visit at some point during the Christmas season, either after the Christmas play or after caroling or a party. He’d come in to the fellowship hall and sit on the stage so everyone could get pictures with their kids. Everyone got a candy cane and an orange, and one time there were ice cream cones.

 

25 Days of Christmas Memories – Day 8

December 8

Church Christmas pageants. I’m not sure how many churches still do the simple Nativity plays anymore; they seem to have given way to more elaborate, sometimes almost off-Broadway-style extravaganzas. The church I grew up in wasn’t very big, and we barely had enough kids willing and able to even do a simple Nativity, so our plays were almost always simple retellings of the Christmas story. Sometimes we’d do it in church, in place of the sermon, sometimes after church in place of Sunday school, or sometimes in the evening. I think I liked the evenings the best. There was something about doing the story in a dimly lit church. It made it easier to imagine the first Christmas night, with Mary and Joseph in a dark stable, shepherds in the fields watching their flocks by night, and then the spotlit angel appearing to give them the Good News.

When I was in 6th grade, we did one of our first non-Nativity plays. It was called 365 Days of Christmas. It was kind of a corny story about an angel visiting a bunch of kids who were goofing their way through play practice, and she shows the kids how the spirit of Christmas and the love of Christ can be present all throughout the year, through the other holidays, and even through the days of summer. I still have the book somewhere, and I still sing the songs in my head sometimes. In fact, I used a couple of them at Bible Release Time in years past.

25 Days of Christmas Memories – Day 7

December 7

Christmas TV specials. Who doesn’t remember all the animated Christmas specials that began airing after Thanksgiving? As kids, my brother and I waited anxiously for Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (my favorite, since I was obsessed with every kind of deer), A Charlie Brown Christmas, and Frosty the Snowman. When we were growing up, we obviously didn’t have the hundreds of channels we have now; we had maybe 5 or 6, tops. Almost all the Christmas specials we watched aired on CBS, which for us was Channel 21, WHP.

I can’t recall how old I was when a new Christmas special aired–or maybe it wasn’t new, but I just hadn’t seen it before: Nestor the Long-Eared Donkey. Like Rudolph, it dealt with a youngster who was different and therefore bullied, and who had to find his place in the world. While I don’t think it ever replaced Rudolph or Charlie Brown among my favorites, it still made an impact on me, long before I ever encountered being bullied myself. On a funny note, that year, or the year after, I don’t remember which, my brother and sister-in-law got me a stuffed donkey for Christmas, and of course I named it Nestor.

What was your favorite Christmas TV special?

25 Days of Christmas Memories – Day 6

December 6

Nativity scenes. Having grown up in the church, I have always been taught that Christmas is first and foremost a celebration of the birth of Jesus Christ, and nativity scenes were always a big part of the imagery and the decor.

One of the things I remember about Millersburg is the huge, heavy nativity display in the town square. The set actually belonged to my church, Trinity UCC, and every year a group of us would carry the pieces down to the square and set it up. One of the most memorable events surrounding this public display occurred the year we got a new pastor. He insisted that the Christ child should not be put into the manger until Christmas Eve. After some discussion, the powers-that-be agreed, and the display was set up, minus Baby Jesus.

Apparently, the word didn’t get round to everyone in town, because about a week later, an angry letter appeared in the local newspaper, chastising whoever had been so sacrilegious and crass as to steal the Baby Jesus. The pastor of our church then had to write a response to that letter, assuring the town that Baby Jesus was safely awaiting Christmas Eve to make his appearance.

I have my own tradition with nativity scenes as well. After my dad died, and my mom was cleaning out the house, I claimed all the nativity scenes she had, and I display them every year. In years past, I had them kind of scattered all over the house, but last year, I decided to put all the smaller ones on one table; I also have a rather large one that I always sat on the mantle. This year, for ease of placement, I decided to set it on top of our console TV instead.

In the picture, the three creches in front are from my mom’s collection. The one on the far left is one I made for her at some point in Sunday school, and I’m sure someone also made the one on the right. I can’t recall where she got the while ceramic one in the middle. The larger one in the back is one my dad bought for me right after Mike and I got married, and the candle holder creche in the back was a gift from my friend Kelli.

I haven’t bought any nativities recently, though. I may have to remedy that.

25 Days of Christmas Memories – Day 5

December 5

Does anyone remember Christmas catalogs? I don’t mean the thicker-than-usual-but-still-paltry Toys-R-Us flyers that begin showing up around Thanksgiving; I mean the phone-book-size catalogs that came from Sears or JC Penney and had everything from clothes to toys to household items to fancy gadgets.

My brother and I always waited anxiously for these catalogs, and when they finally came, we’d spend days fighting over who would get to look at it first, and I swear if we’d had an egg timer in the house, we’d probably have set it to make sure we each got out fair share of time looking at it.

Back in those days, we didn’t have internet or Amazon and all those other online shopping sites, so we looked forward to those catalogs that held treasures we’d likely never have thought of on our own. We kids would sit for hours poring over all the cool stuff and adding to the list we’d read to Santa when we got the chance to see him.

The lure of those catalogs didn’t wear off as we got older, either; the only thing that changed was what we were looking for. As I got older, my attention drifted away from the stuffed animals and Barbies, and started gravitating more towards clothes, electric keyboards, and science-y things like telescopes and rock tumblers.

I’m sure there are still catalogs around today, but I doubt they’re anything near as awesome as the ones we had when I was a kid. I also doubt they’d feel as special either, when we can just hop online and find anything we want any day of the year. I’d love to find one and bring it home for my kids to look at, just to give them a taste of what it was like to make a Christmas list in “the old days.”

What was your ultimate must-have item from a Christmas catalog?

25 Days of Christmas Memories – Day 4

December 4th

Christmas cards. These things are such a necessary evil to so many people. Even now, I have a love-hate relationship with them. It was always exciting as a child to see the stacks of mail come in, with all the different-colored envelopes that you didn’t see any other time of the year. It seemed I didn’t know a lot of the people we got cards from, but isn’t that the way it usually goes?

Our family was never much for the family newsletters; I don’t recall getting very many of those, if ever, and my parents never sent one out either. The most exciting things we ever got in Christmas cards were the cousins’ or nieces’ and nephews’ school pictures.

My favorite cards were always the ones with a lot of glitter on them. It didn’t matter what the picture was, as long as it was covered with glitter. An added bonus for me (but not so much for my mom) was that the glitter always fell off onto my hands, the table, the floor. It seemed we had a reminder of those cards for months after they were gotten rid of (my parents weren’t sentimental and didn’t keep every card they got).

One especially memorable year for me was the year Doug had gone to college in New Mexico. He didn’t come home for Christmas because it was too expensive to either drive or fly home. But one year, he sent a Christmas card to both Gary and me. They were quite different than any cards we had seen before. There were no snowy landscapes or pictures of Santa; those cards had road runners on them. Of course, there were some touches of Christmas, like a few Christmas trees and a wreath on the door of an adobe house, but it was definitely a “New Mexico” type card.

25 Days of Christmas Memories – Day 3

December 3

Christmas cookies. I remember when I was a child, Mom would bake dozens and dozens of cookies—cut-outs, pinwheels, checkerboards, thumbprints, and many more that I don’t know the names of. I honestly don’t know who ate all those cookies, because even with four of us kids plus Mom and Dad, it seemed like an awful lot. I can’t remember what my favorite cookie was, but I’m pretty sure the cut-outs were near the top of the list. I especially loved the reindeer-shaped cutter, and I insisted that we make lots of reindeer. Of course, I also loved cats during that time, but there were no cat cookie cutters around then (or if there were, we couldn’t find them in our small-town stores).

Mom stopped baking when I was a teenager, so I took over as head Christmas Cookie Baker. Now, I never did the real fancy ones like the pinwheels, but I did make cut-outs, chocolate chip, and chocolate cookies with peanut butter chips.

And hermits. Dad’s favorite cookies were hermits, a spice cookie with nuts and raisins that Grandma Daniels used to bake. For such a simple drop cookie, those things seemed to be difficult. They would either get rock hard or not bake through. Dad told so many stories about Grandma griping about her cookies being like rocks. Grandpa always assured her, “Well, then they’re good for dunking.”

I made hermits for the first time the year Grandma had died. Dad warned me that Grandma always had trouble with them, and not to get discouraged if they got hard. I wanted to do it anyway. My first batch of hermits was heaven, baked to perfection, chewy, and spicy-sweet. Dad asked me how I pulled that off, and I told him that maybe Grandma had helped. He said, “Yeah, maybe she did.”

25 Days of Christmas Memories – Day 2

December 2nd

Decorating. Every year I watch the TV specials about the extreme Christmas decorations some people put up, with enough lights to send your electric bill into the quadruple digits or with so many animatronic figures that the front yard isn’t even visible anymore. And I pore through magazines showing pictures of homes  decorated according to a theme or a color scheme. Every light, Christmas ball, and mantle decoration had to fit in, or it was gone. I was always awestruck by both of these practices, probably because our decorations were nowhere near extreme or perfect. Nope, the Christmas decorations we had were an accumulated mish-mash of whatever my parents had gathered in their travels while Dad was in the Air Force, or whatever struck their fancy.

Our decorations always came out of the basement and the attic on Thanksgiving weekend. As a young child in our house on Market Street, I recall boxes of decorations piled higher than I stood, and I used to love crawling around in between the stacks, hiding from my parents and my brothers. I don’t recall helping all that much with the tree; Dad always wanted the lights just so, and I think Mom was afraid Gary and I would break the ornaments (no shatterproof Christmas balls in those days!). We never had any special tree decorations, just the run-of-the-mill multi-colored glass balls and tinsel garland. One year Mom did buy some small blown glass ornaments—animals for me and trains for Gary. I don’t know that they lasted all that long, for obvious reasons.

One of my favorite ornaments was a huge snow-covered church that lit up and played “Silent Night.” It wasn’t ceramic like most music boxes today, but was some kind of waxy material. I remember it being quite heavy, and I was never allowed to move it. The snow on the roof was made of what looked like glitter-coated quilt batting. The church was old even when I was young, and the snow even then was already dirty-looking, but I loved it to death. I opted not to take it when Mom was cleaning out the house after Dad died, and I regret that now. I’m sure it’s gone to the land of memories.

Another decoration that I loved, and one that sits on my mantle now, was a carved wooden dog. It’s brown with black spots, and it’s sitting down with its nose pointed skyward. I never understood why Mom had that with the Christmas decorations because there’s really nothing Christmassy about it. Still, one of the highlights of getting the decorations out was the anticipation of finding that wooden dog so I could play with it for a month out of the year.

25 Days of Christmas Memories – Day 1

December 1st

When I was growing up in Millersburg, Pennsylvania, we kids always knew that Christmas was coming when the gazebo and the town square were decorated. Wreaths were hung all around the gazebo, and miniature evergreen trees and light strings were placed around the square and along Market Street and State Street. The lights were those old-fashioned big bulbs, and they only came in red, blue, and green. The decorations may have been simple, but they were unforgettable. Millersburg, in my mind, has one of the most beautiful Christmas displays I have ever seen, and it just embodies all that is special about living in a small town.

The annual tree lighting used to be the Saturday after Thanksgiving (I believe they now hold it on Black Friday evening, but when I was growing up, it was on a Saturday). My church, Trinity UCC on Center Street, used to hold a holiday bazaar that afternoon that ended shortly before the tree lighting. The Women’s Guild would sell soup, sandwiches, and all kinds of baked goods; there would be different stations throughout the fellowship hall with various kids’ games, face painting, and such; and the Sunday school classes always made simple ornaments to sell for a quarter apiece to raise money for the Christian Education fund.

I don’t remember much about the actual lighting ceremonies, unfortunately, but I’m sure there was some kind of entertainment, whether it was carolers or the high school band and chorus doing Christmas songs. Of course, Santa would make an appearance as well, usually on a fire truck. At least once I remember him sitting up on the gazebo. Kids could go up and read him their Christmas lists or have their pictures taken with him.

Ley Lines Churches & Ghosts

The Curious Fortean

One of my favorite things to do is to get out and about in search of oddities, maybe looking around locations that are supposed to be haunted or perhaps looking for out of place animals or visiting ancient sites that are full of legends, myths and monsters. I’m very lucky to live in an area that is full of these things and much more, and I’m also very lucky to have a good friend who also enjoys these forays into forteana.

It was last Wednesday that my friend Ed sent me a message via Facebook to let me know that he, unexpectedly had the next two days off of work and would I like to try a bit of ley dowsing. As I myself had no work the following Friday I jumped at the chance and arrangements were made.

So Friday morning came and I made the journey from my…

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