Radio Script #748

Little Talks on Common Things

December 24, 1967

Every year since this program started nearly twenty years ago, the broadcast on Christmas Sunday has been devoted to the subject of Christmas. During those 19 previous Christmas broadcasts I have talked about the historic background of Christmas celebrations, about St. Nicholas, Santa Claus, and Kris Kringle, about the origin of the Christmas tree, of Christmas candles, of the association with reindeer, of Christmas carols, and of Christmas giving. I have told you how late was any recognition of Christmas in New England, how in 1870 a workman was fined in Massachusetts because he refused to work on Christmas Day, and how until 1856 not a single ad in a Waterville newspaper made any reference to Christmas. And through all those broadcasts I have not neglected to remind you of the constant abiding meaning of Christmas to the Christian world.

Today I want to leave the books and the authorities, the multitude of writings about Christmas, and talk about how Christmas was observed in a Western Maine town in the days of my boyhood more than 60 years ago. I cannot remember when Christmas was not a time for gifts. The Puritan prohibition against festivities and presents on December 25 had vanished many years before I was born. So the stores of my rural Maine village looked forward to brisk business at Christmas time. One of the merchants who planned on Christmas sales was my father. Although he was called a grocer and his chief business was in food supplies, it was not his only sales line.

Before I was old enough to know much about the business, it had been the usual type of country general store, selling clothing and yard goods, boots and shoes, hardware and kitchen utensils, as well as groceries. When I became acquainted with the store, all the non-grocery items had gone except china and crockery. That continued to be my father’s special line and he would not give it up to make his store, like several others in town, simply for groceries. One side of the big store’s ground floor was devoted entirely to dishes dinner and tea sets, platters and huge covered dishes, cups and saucers, and those fascinating mustard dishes with a rooster mounted on the cover.

While Father was always eager to sell anything in his crockery line for Christmas presents, each year he presented some special feature. One year it would be parlor lamps — those big oil lamps with globular bowls in gay, colored designs. Another year it would be what were called chocolate sets — a tall, slender china pot for cocoa or chocolate, with half a dozen cups and saucers to match. For several years Father took advantage of the early 20th century fad for china souvenirs. Those were small dishes, mostly what were called pin trays, because nobody used an ash tray in those days. I still have one of those little souvenir dishes — a tiny tray containing a picture of the town’s biggest hotel, the four-story Bridgton House. On the back is stamped, “Made in Austria for Marriner and Whitney, Bridgton, Maine.”

A sure-fire sale every Christmas was the mustache cup for men. It was an oversize coffee cup with a bar across the top to keep the drinker’s mustache out of the coffee. Almost as common, for ladies to give husbands and boy friends for Christmas, was the shaving mug, which, if ordered ahead of time, could have the man’s initials on it.

The grocery section of the store also profited from Christmas. Biggest item was Christmas candy. The cheapest was hard crystals that came to the store in big barrels and sold for ten cents a pound. Good ribbon candy cost twice as much, but anyone who paid more than twenty cents for a pound of Christmas candy was just plain extravagant. Christmas was also a time for the store to stock the largest navel oranges, which sometimes then brought the enormous price of five cents each. Smaller oranges could always be had for fifteen to forty cents a dozen, according to size, but a lot of people wanted the largest obtainable, one for each Christmas stocking. Speaking of stockings, ours were never as the poem said “hung by the chimney with care”. We had in our home no fireplace, and our Christmas stockings were hung near the big Round Oak coal stove, which to be sure did have a pipe leading into the chimney. I don’t think we children ever considered how Santa Claus got into the house.

During my life I have heard a lot of argument about letting children believe in Santa Claus. Where I hear such discussion I always ask if anyone remembers any feeling of hurt or shock when he first was disillusioned about the old saint. For my own part, I cannot remember how or when I first discovered the mystical nature of Santa Claus, and the very fact that I cannot remember is strong evidence that the disillusionment had no lasting effect on me.

Despite all the debunking done by modern psychology, no one can take away the reality of children’s make-believe. The fairy stories, the mother goose rhymes, are all very real to small children, and so is Santa Claus. When the time comes for their rational minds to recognize the nature of fairy stories, children seldom feel that they have been deceived or cheated. It is the same when they think of Santa Claus. Just as the best myths and fairy stories out of the ancient past have profound meanings, so does Santa Claus, for he is the Christmas spirit of cheerful giving — something that not all the hullabaloo of commercialized Christmas can wholly take away.

Strangely, I have no boyhood recollection of Christmas carols. I suppose they must have been sung at Christmas parties sixty to seventy years ago, but one certainly didn’t hear them on the streets of our village. That was before the day of recorders and loud speakers. Homes had just begun to acquire the Victrola with its big cornucopia-shaped horn, but no merchant would insult his customers by blaring out carols to them on the new invention.

The Christmas song I remember best was “Jingle Bells”, and in those days it meant something:
“Jingle bells, jingle bells, Jingle all the way,
o what fun it is to ride
In a one-horse, open sleigh.”

If you made a head-count today of all inhabitants of Waterville, Fairfield, Oakland, Winslow, Sidney, Vassalboro and even farther away, I wonder how many people you would find who ever rode in a one-horse, open sleigh. Of course most persons old enough for social security benefits did have that experience, but I suspect some as old as fifty never knew the thrill of that kind of sleigh ride.

By the time I was twelve years old I could harness a horse, though I had to stand on a box to do it. The hardest part wasn’t to get the surcingle buckled tight, or get the crupper under the horse’s tail, but to get the bit in his mouth and the bridle over his head. The harder you tried to lift that bridle, the higher the horse lifted his head. You were lucky if you didn’t falloff the box as you strained your arms upward to get that bridle on. When you got that critter finally harnessed on a crisp December day, backed him him in between the shafts of a handsome, low slung brass-trimmed sleigh, you were ready for the sound of jingle bells.

The purpose of bells on sleighs and pungs and sleds was, of course, to give warning of the team’s approach. The big teams, carrying cord wood or lumber, always had deeper sounding bells that clanged but never jingled. It was the pleasure sleighs, and especially the one-horse sleighs, that had the gay, high-pitched bells.

Even some of those sleigh bells had distinctive sounds. So used did my father become to them that, on our usual Sunday afternoon ride, he would often identify an approaching team before it came into sight. “Hush”, he would suddenly say. We would all stop our chatter and listen intently. Frequently Father would say: “Someone’s coming, but I don’t know who”, but almost as often he would say something like this: “Ah ha, I know who’s coming. It’s Charlie Gleason.” And in a few minutes, Charles and Emma Gleason, in a smart rig, would meet us in the snowy road.

Passing a team on a winter road in 1900 was no easy task. In our part of Maine the roads were not broken out by plows, but were rolled down hard by huge wooden rollers pulled by six horses. As storm succeeded storm through the winter, the snow in the road was packed down harder and harder, while on both sides of the road the loose snow banked up high.

Passing another team was all right as long as you kept your right hand runner on the hard-packed road surface. But it was all too easy for that runner to slide off into the loose snow at the edge of the road. When that happened, down went that runner, sometimes more than a foot lower than the left runner, and the driver, who always sat on the right side of the seat, was likely to be pitched out into the drift. That happened once to an uncle of mine, driving alone between Bridgton and Harrison. The horse ran away, dragging the upturned sleigh until the harness broke away from it, and Uncle had to walk two miles into town, where the horse had been stopped.

Of all boyhood Christmas presents the one I remember best was given jointly to my brother and me. It was what boys of our town called a bobsled, but the better known name is double runners. Father had bought two small sleds, and commissioned the local carpenter to put a bumper on each and connect them with a smooth plank. Were we proud of that double runner!

Every Sunday School in town held a Christmas party, where the older people saw that every attending child got at least a bag of candy and a corn ball and where parents brought some of the gifts for their own children. Of course Santa Claus appeared to distribute the gifts, and his coming was preceded by a program of recitations, skits and songs.

It was all very simple and uncomplicated. We cannot and do not want to return to it today. But I assure you that I am not at all sorry that I remember the Christmas of double runners and one horse open sleighs.

Year: 1968