Jean Shepherd was a writer, a radio host and a fantastic storyteller. In the ’60’s and ’70’s he hosted a radio show on WOR New York at 11 pm… I was in Boston at the time and I heard it often. He had a most engaging style, always telling tales about some of the crazy things that happened back in his childhood in Indiana, with his story about the Red Ryder BB gun the most well-known. I tell you this as it was Jean who inspired this next post… a reminiscence about a past Christmas that is particularly dear to me.
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I used to get it every December… in spades! That warm, wonderful feeling that comes over you, that all is right and beautiful with the world, and you are exactly where you’re supposed to me in this moment in time. Feelings of love for the beauty of the earth, for others, for this life… they would expand our hearts and sometimes even bring tears. Tears of joy. A temporary acknowledgement that everything was okay, really. That there was so much more love and goodness in this life, so much more than hate and despair… that the Christmas Spirit brought hope… hell, it was hope, to me.
Once I’d experienced it, I began waiting for it each year, that feeling of Christmas Spirit. it was that important to me, far more important than the special joy of Christmas morning, with the toys and the tree and all. As soon as I felt The Christmas Spirit, I was complete, at peace. Christmas had indeed come again, and all was well.
For me, it came differently every year. I know, I remember… because it seemed so magical. But my Christmas Spirit? Yes, I remember nearly every one. In the early years we’d bring home two trees, a big one for the bar, and a little one for our upstairs apartment. Mom always decorated the bar tree while I was left to decorate the upstairs tree by the time I was six or seven. The lights and the ornaments were always easy for me, but Mom had to teach me her way of hanging the tinsel just so… doubling each strand over and making sure they were all perfectly straight!
Mom, asleep, after finishing the “bar tree.”
It was a pain, but the result was so satisfying… and for years it was simply a labor of love that I learned to enjoy. And often the Christmas spirit came to me while I was upstairs in that little apartment above the bar, decorating the tree, with the lights and the balls just so, then hanging the icicles down very straight, one by one, until the tree shimmered, holding my eyes with a beauty and a sense of peace I couldn’t look away from.
On those tree-decorating evenings, which I did alone, I’d put on our five Christmas records and play them while I decorated. What were those records?? Percy Faith’s Joy To The World; The Ames Brothers’ There’ll Always Be A Christmas; Bing Crosby’s White Christmas; Nat King Cole’s The Christmas Song; and some organ and bell choir doing Christmas Favorites. Once in a while Dad would come up the stairs and hand me an Orange Crush or a Seven-Up, then throw another chunk of wood. in the stove, to keep his little fella warm while he trimmed the tree.
These records had become scratched over the years, and even skipped in a few places, but I knew them so well I could hum along through the skips, never missing a beat. In later years I would replace most of them with CDs, and strangely, kind of missed the scratches and skips.
One year the Christmas Spirit came to me while I was decorating the tree, with the Ames Brothers’ Oh, Holy Night, playing. That overwhelming sense of abiding peace and magic flowed through me that night, and I felt like the happiest boy on earth.
It came to me one early evening, as I was walking back up the street from the post office. The big Christmas tree, that the town always put up in the center of town, was lit, and in the last glow of evening I stood right next to it, looking up at it, feeling its power and beauty. The big lights (colored light bulbs) swayed gently in the breeze and I remember feeling that Virginia City had to be the very best place in the world to be at Christmas.
And it came to me one Christmas Eve. As I was leaving church after the evening service, Selma Brook grabbed my arm and had me help her down the steps to the sidewalk. We stopped there for a moment, looking up at the cold, star-filled sky, our breath billowing above us in the chilly Montana night. We could see the snow falling gently in the street light across the street. Selma squeezed my arm, looked up at me and said softly, “Stevie, isn’t Virginia City the best place to spend Christmas?”
My throat got tight, and I hugged her. “Yes, Selma, it truly is.”
My Christmas Spirit would build slowly, starting with cutting down the trees with Dad, then our big Saturday trip into the “big city” of Butte for all our Christmas shopping. Butte really was the big city to me, with all its lights and holiday atmosphere. On top of that, a trip into Hennessy’s basement to see Santa and their huge electric train layout usually helped jump-start my Christmas feeling of good cheer.
Christmas in uptown Butte in the ’50’s
The year I turned 12, Mom let me order an electric train from the Sears & Roebuck catalog. It was a dandy, a North Coast Limited (which actually ran through Montana) and had a transformer that could run two trains at a time!
I was beyond excited to get my new train… it was so cool! And during the last week of school before Christmas, I would run down to the post office after school to see if my train had come in yet. Ben Williams, the postmaster, always shook his head and said, “No, Stevie, it didn’t come in today.”
I was in agony. We’d ordered it two weeks before, from somewhere in California, and I knew it should have been here by now. And when Christmas Eve day finally arrived, I was sure that my train wouldn’t show up by Christmas. I was quiet, disappointed, but I walked slowly down to the post office after school to ask Ben, one last time, if my train might have finally arrived. He looked at me, sort of kindly, and said, “There’s a good-size box here, Stevie. Let’s see if it’s for you.”
He opened the private door to the inner office and set a big box out on the floor in front of me. I looked at the mailing label, but I already knew… it was my train! I carried that big box up the hill to our bar, half running with excitement, and burst into the bar with, “Mom! Dad! It’s here!”
Then there was the day that Rena McDonald, our 5-8 grade teacher, told Ricky and me we were to leave class for the afternoon and cut down a Christmas tree for our room. Why she did that we will never know… perhaps to simply get us out of there for a few hours??
Whatever… after lunch Rick & I left school, dropped by his house for his sled and an axe, and headed for Rocky. Rocky was a small mountain on the west end of town, covered with pine, spruce, and you guessed it… rocks. We knew we could find a good tree up there as we’d built a fort up there with rocks and trees the previous summer. Remember that, Rick? We found what we thought to be a good tree, chopped it down and dragged it back to town and up to the school right as class was ending.
Mrs. McDonald seemed surprised, maybe even amazed, that we did exactly what she asked us to, and did it fairly well, for the tree was truly beautiful, if a little too big. Big enough, in fact, that two of the bigger boys had to get a ladder to get the lights on near the top. As Matt Stiles and Ricky’s older brother, Eddie were decorating the top, the rest of us were trimming the bottom, with Mrs. McDonald clucking around us, saying really meaningful Christmas things like, “My, my.That’s very nice, Casey. You know this tree will be dead within a week, don’t you?”
And there it was… that wonderful rush of Christmas Spirit, making the world suddenly clearer, rosier, happier than it had been all year.
One of my favorite lines in our Christmas music was from the Ames Brothers album. In the song, Good King Wenceslas –
“Mark thy footsteps, my good page
Tread thou in them boldly.
Thou shall find the winter’s rage
freeze thy blood less coldly.”
That would always remind me of how I felt with Dad when we went up into the mountains to get our yearly Christmas trees. No matter how far we were away from town, no matter how high up, no matter how cold and wintry and how deep the snow, I was never cold, never afraid when I was with my dad, trudging beside him, or following in his footsteps when the snow was deep.
Even through my high school years, Dad and I would still drive up into the tall timber outside of town, and get the two trees, for it had become a family tradition, and always fun. Now, however, whenever Dad stopped in the trees for a moment, to pull that pint of Brandy out of his hip pocket, he’d take a big drink, then offer it to me… which I always accepted. And there began a different kind of Christmas Spirit for me. It usually took us four hours or so to bring the trees back. Mom knew, of course, it shouldn’t have taken that long, but never said anything.
There’s no trying to explain it or analyze it, the Christmas Spirit… a very rare and special feeling that I’m sure we all feel in a different way. Point is, it was a very real feeling for me, one which I got every Christmas for years. It finally drifted away, probably somewhere in my twenties or early thirties. and that it was, finally, replaced (with luck) with a sense of peace and contentment, as one poured oneself yet another glass of brandy. I remember missing it at first, then figuring out that growing responsibilities and the gradual loss of wonder of life were probably the ultimate culprits.
Turns out that Christmas time can be a difficult, inward-looking time for many of us. High expectations of the season are a huge problem… it’s virtually impossible to expect several days of perceived perfection, let alone several weeks! It’s a human condition, after all… one of those things we can be aware of but still can’t quite fix. “Peace On Earth” is a myth and “Good Will Toward All” has been handily booted out of the country for now, assuming it ever really existed at all. But I can tell you this – Peace On Earth And Good Will Toward Man existed in Virginia City, Montana during the Christmas of 1955.
I remember it so well, I know that it existed and was real. And in that, I have hope that a time like that, and a feeling like that, can possibly come again. For now, I will hold that memory most dear, and will cherish it always!
Steve Hulse
Merry Christmas!
