Radio Script #557

Little Talks on Common Things

December 23, 1962

Ever since this program started, fifteen years ago, we have devoted the Christmas Sunday broadcast to the subject of Christmas itself. On this program you have been reminded of Christmas customs, Christmas beliefs, and Christmas observances allover the world. Let’s begin tonight with some of the things persons of my awn age remember about Christmas in Maine sixty or more years ago.

My own earliest recollection of Christmas is hanging my stocking, a long black stocking such as small boys then wore. We lived in a house with no central heating and no fire place, and it was quite impossible to imagine Santa Claus coming down the small-flued Chimneys in that little story-and-a-half house. Nevertheless, our stockings were hung behind the big Round Oak coal stove in the central room of the house, the room that served as dining room in the summer and living room in the winter.

The front room was the parlor, where a special guest was sometimes entertained, but was often open only for special occasions. I can remember its being used for my aunt’s wedding; then it suddenly acquired more ordinary use. I was not at all musical – couldn’t tell one note from another; but when my younger brother and sister showed musical aptitude the family bought a piano, and the sacred parlor became devoted to piano practice. Since the house had only two heating units, the kitchen range and the coal stove in the middle room, something had to be done to keep a player’s fingers from freezing when the inevitable practice sessions occurred, and Father bought an oil heater, one of those smelly, tricky, dangerous old-fashioned kerosene heaters. Fortunately it never exploded, but my brother always insisted that, while it kept his back warm, his front toward the piano was always cold. Well, we have been getting a long way from those stockings.

We were not allowed to get up on Christmas morning until the bedrooms were light enough to see objects without lamplight, for just as we had no central heating, we had no electric lights. We then rushed downstairs in night clothes, for one of the blessings of Christmas morning was to be able to dress in the warm glow of the coal fire in the big stove. But of course there was no dressing until stockings had been emptied and other presents opened. We knew of neighboring families where neither stocking nor wrapped gift could be touched until after breakfast, but our household suffered no such cruel and unusual punishment.

I cannot remember that we had a Christmas tree until after my sister, 11 years younger than I, was four or five years old, and by that time I was in high school. In our Maine community home Christmas trees were not common. Their place was taken by the big church Christmas trees. Everyone of the four Protestant churches held a party for the children on Christmas Eve. At our Universalist Church it was a gala occasion, for we had the only church in town that allowed dancing. Of course the party was especially for the younger children, who didn’t dance, but after the program was over and Santa Claus had distributed the gifts, the floor Was cleared and dancing went on until midnight.

The program always consisted of Christmas recitations, solos, duets and choruses, after which Santa Claus entered amid a jingling of bells and shouted whoas to the imagined reindeer. Then he distributed gifts from the big tree that reached almost to the ceiling of the high room so high that Santa’s helpers had to use stepladders to reach the topmost branches. Some children got all of their gifts on that occasion, the families preferring to let them have everything at that church gathering the night before Christmas, rather than wait for some of their gifts on Christmas morning at home. I remember a time when one boy, got nineteen gifts from that church Christmas tree.

But in our family we made much of Christmas at home. After early morning distribution of gifts and a hearty breakfast, we children settled down with our new toys and new books. For Christmas there were always a lot of books, for ours was a reading family. Unlike Thanksgiving, we did not have a lot of relatives around the table for dinner, nor did we go to grandmother’s or one of the aunts’ for the Christmas meal. We had our Christmas dinner as our own intimate family feast. I can never remember eating turkey for either Thanksgiving or Christmas until after I had left home to attend college. None of the neighbors in our Maine village ever served turkey. For both holidays chicken was the piece de resistance, though a few of the upper crust families celebrated With suckling pig roasted whole.

After dinner we all piled into the two-seated sleigh to call on relatives who lived outside the village and politely examine their gifts. We usually were back home in time for us children to go sliding on the village’s long hill that descended to a flat stretch right in front of our house. The most memorable Christmas present of my boyhood came when I was ten years old and my brother was six. Given jointly to both of us was a set of double runners. Father had persuaded a local carriage maker to build them, using two factory made sleds for the front and rear sections, with a good, stiff board, capable of seating six youngsters, joining the two sleds. We were mighty proud kids to possess one of the few custom-made double runners in town.

In a peculiar respect Christmas was a very special day in our home. It was the one day of the year when Father absolutely refused to go to his store. On any other day of the year — any Sunday, any Thanksgiving Day, any Fourth of July — Father would respond to a customer showing up at the house with a hard luck story about being unable to get to the store the day before. Wouldn’t Father please go with them to the store so they wouldn’t starve? Father would and did, but not on Christmas Day. He said that day belonged to his family, and that store door wasn’t going to be unlocked for anyone.

Well, anyhow, that is some of the things I remember about Christmas more than sixty years ago.

We hear a great deal of talk, pretty well justified, about the commercialization of Christmas. Yet that subject, like most others, has two sides. An article I chanced to read a few weeks ago is so unusual that I want to share part of it with you. Now mind you, this article was published, not in a trade journal, not in a magazine like Business Week, but in a religious periodical, published by one of our nation’s great, evangelical church bodies. Listen to a few excerpts from that article: “When at Christmas time you buy something for a member of your immediate family, a distant relative, or a friend, you probably never think that what you are doing has any connection with the commercialization of Christmas. All you are doing is remembering with gifts a few persons at Christmastime, and you would not like to be denied that privilege, now would you?

“But what about the other millions of people in our country who are doing the same thing, just buying presents for relatives and friends? If you and yours were the only people to be considered, there would be no problem. But when everyone else does the same thing, then you have to understand that it takes thousands of stores and tons of merchandise and hundreds of extra sales people to satisfy the demand. So you come to realize that there is a perfectly valid reason for crowded streets, plugged up parking lots, and jostling crowds — the things that all add up to the commercialization of Christmas. But so far as you and your family are concerned, you want it just that way, and so do millions of other families too.

“For, you see, this is Christmas. You wouldn’t change it if you could, because it is the eternal glory of Christmas that it glorifies everything it touches. Evergreen trees with their brilliant lights, even the new synthetic trees of plastic, decorations in streets and stores, Christmas carols filling the air, and best of all the little children with eyes full of wonder.

“Pull back the curtain of time and see once more what happened at the first Christmas. Wise men from the East, making their way to Bethlehem, came to the child in his mother’s arms and, opening their packs, made him gifts of gold and frankincense and myrrh. If, standing by at that scene, there was anyone who deplored it as commercialization of goods, the Gospel does not mention it.

“Of course not all Christmas gifts today are like that. But when gifts spring from genuine affection they are always hallowed gifts. Such gifts speak a language that no words can express. They bring joy and gladness to those who give. At least once a year something like that ought to happen. So let us stop talking all this nonsense about commercialization.”

At another point the article reminds us that we probably never heard minister or priest preach a Christmas sermon based on the following passage in Matthew’s gospel: “Now when Jesus was at Bethany in the house of Simon the leper, a woman came up to Him with alabaster jar of expensive ointment and poured it all on to Bas head, as He sat at table. And when the disciples saw it, they said: ‘Why this waste? For this ointment might have been sold for a large sum and given to the poor.’ But Jesus said to them, ‘Why do you trouble this woman, for she has done a beautiful thing. Truly, I say to you, wherever the gospel is preached in the whole world, what this woman has done will be told in memory of her.’

Now the point of that Bible passage is not that we should be extravagant and wasteful. Jesus was only praising the woman for her kindness, her generosity, her out poured love. That story says something to all of us that we need, not only at Christmas, but throughout the year. All of us certainly need more generous spirits, more thoughtfulness of others, more love of our fellow men.

And so, listeners to Little Talks on Common Things, we come to Christmas of 1962, a Christmas following close on the heels of our narrow escape from the awful annihilation of nuclear war. Some of us will never know what Christmas is like in the year 2000, but little children clutching the hand and sitting on the knee of Santa Claus in Waterville stores will know and enjoy that Christmas with their own children and grandchildren.

That is, they will know it if we who are adults today, world over, in East and West alike, will only listen to the song that the angels sang on that first Christmas Day over the fields of Bethlehem — “Peace on earth to men of good will”.

Year: 1963