Christmas Lore
What’s your favorite Christmas tale? Here are a few of mine:
The Christmas Truce of 1914
On a cold Christmas Eve, at midnight along the trenches of World War I in Belgium, the Germans began singing Silent Night. The British troops responded with their own Christmas carols. Then something remarkable happened: soldiers from both sides ventured into No Man’s Land and began exchanging gifts…
Read more: The Christmas Truce of 1914.
The Christmas Song and Mel Torme
Another favorite Christmas story is how a sweltering July day in the San Fernando Valley in July of 1945 inspired Mel Torme and Bob Wells to pen a holiday classic: The Christmas Song. Although it’s been told many times, many ways…
Read more: The Christmas Song and Mel Torme.
Yes, Virginia, There Is a Santa Claus
In September of 1897, the eight year old daughter of a Manhattan coroner’s assistant wrote the New York Sun asking if there was really a Santa Claus. Francis Church, a former Civil War corespondent, replied with one of the most touching editorials of all time…
Read more: Yes, Virginia, There Is a Santa Claus.
Full text of Church’s editorial: Is There a Santa Claus?
Read More: Christmas, Christmas truce, The Christmas Song, Mel Torme, Robert Wells, Francis Church, Santa Claus, Christmas Tales
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My favorite is my first Christmas in America. I was 7 years old and we lived in a basement apartment. I didn’t know anything about getting presents on Christmas.
I had trouble opening the rear door as there was a nylon stocking filled with fruit and candy hanging from the door handle. I thought I died and went to heaven as I dumped the contents of the stocking on the kitchen table and found some small toys amongst the fruit and candy.
I was about to go outside again and noticed a fancy wrapped box outside the door. I opened it to find a Tonto outfit complete with holster and toy gun. I called my cousin to tell him of about this great costume I received.
He told me that he received a Lone Ranger outfit.
We lived about a mile and a half apart. We both dressed in our outfits and trudged thru the snow and met somewhere in between to marvel at our good fortune. As far as I can recall, we didn’t even wear coats, so as not to cover up these fantastic outfits.
My cousin and I reminisce about this fantastic Christmas quite a bit.
That’s beautiful, dude…dang, that’s one of MY favorite Christmas stories now, and I wasn’t even there!
I was just on the tail end of the popularity of “Cowboys and Indians” (yes, I know the PC term, as well as the literally correct term is Native Americans, and I’m supposedly about 1/32 Cherokee myself…is anybody in America NOT part Native American at this point?) Anyway, I had the holsters and the cap guns, and watched Gunsmoke and Bonanza and John Wayne movies when they were on TV on Sunday afternoons. One of my biggest Christmas mornings was when I was a kid and got a Fort Apache cowboy/indian play set. But by the mid-1970s us kids stopped playing cowboys so much and leaned more toward playing army or frontier explorer or football…don’t know if it was the changing times or if that’s just natural to leave the pretend cowboy stuff behind when growing from 7 to 10 years old.
According to family legend, I am part Crow Indian. A blue eyed, blond haired Indian, but an Indian. I learned this right in the middle of my Cowboy and Indian days, so I switched and started painting my face and scalping my victims after I knifed or speared them. I remember my Mother having to tell me to tone down the brutality…and I got my bow and arrows taken away because I took off the rubber tips. When a new kid moved in down the street I proudly told him I was an Indian. He asked me” “Dot head or wagon burner”? He said it so fast I had to ask him three times before I answered “wagon burner”…with a glint in my eye. Yep, we ran around more fires burning in my red wagon than I can remember. The fun stopped when I rolled a burning wagon down the hill into a lightly forested meadow…in August. There must have been 25 people swinging wet blankets, shoves and hoses to put out that fire. You just can’t believe how beautiful that meadow looked the next spring without all that nasty underbrush and dead grass. It looked like someone had planted lawn.
Oh yeah, Christmas:
That Christmas (my 6th) I got a BB gun.
Never got a BB gun…my granny lived next door, and she lobbied my parents against it…was afraid I’d shoot all her songbirds. On the other hand, I still have both eyes :-)
What about those old electric football sets, the kind with the field painted on a piece of vibrating sheet metal with the plastic players running all over the place. One Xmas I got that (speaking of cowboys and indians, the teams on my electric football set were Cowboys vs. the Colts) and a GI Joe Adventure Team set. That Christmas morning was heaven on earth!
Joe I do remember those vibrating football games. As far as I can recall nobody ever scored a touch down since all the players kept going around in circles.
Back in the 50’s you could go into a hardware store and buy a rifle no matter your age. All the guys I knew had 22 rifles and we would go into the praries around where we lived and blasted away at cans and bottles.
As a matter of fact there was a time in the 50’s when you walked into one of these hardware stores and they had 50 gallon carboard drums filled with WWII rifles that you could buy for 10 or 15 dollars.
Xman what were you smoking in that peace pipeto be so violent at such an early age?
Hey Joe, I don’t recall who bought me my BB gun. It very well could have been my Grandmother as she is who got me all my cool gifts. I got one of those football games! I didn’t know football at that time and I couldn’t figure it out…and Dad lived 800+ miles away. But, he brought a rubber gun set that fired ping pong balls when you squeezed. We sat at opposite ends of the table and shot out the candles on my cake.
Pelmo, you are right about anyone could buy a gun. I saved from odd jobs all summer before I went into 7th grade so I could buy the semi-auto 22 at the grocery store for $29.99. Man, that thing could hold like 20 or 30 bullets in a tube parallel to the barrel. The clerk put up with me coming in to look at my gun all summer.
By then, I had had enough BB gun battles with the 17 year old 2 houses away. We started out with a rule that we took no shots above the waist. Then, nothing above the shoulders. When I took one in the cheek, that was it! I was done playing with that guy. It was then I realized he had been the one setting the target rules. He begged, but I was done. I didn’t trust him anymore. I’ve always wondered if he was right in the head since.
To answer your question, Pelmo, I wasn’t violent to the point of ever drawing blood…and not even serious pain. The BB gun thing spooked me for life. Of course I also had to learn lessons with fire crackers, my 22 and women. I did get into my various play acting roles though. We raided many campers around their campfires when I was around 6 - 10.
My memories are mostly impure thoughts of Mrs. Claus, home alone.
I figured she wouldn’t waste her yearly opportunity to be naughty.
No, no, no, IndigoBusiness…because Santa has over a billion homes to visit, his sleigh team must travel at 99.999 percent the speed of light (requiring him to gain almost infinite mass, which is why some witnesses have described him as fat although he’s really just another skinny little elf.) The upshot is that while Santa travels at light speed, from his relative view the rest of the world practically stands still, including Mrs. Claus. And from Mrs. Claus’s standpoint, Santa takes off and then he’s back, literally in the twinkling of an eye. So…no chance for her to be naughty, even if Kid IndigoBusiness had survived the trek to the North Pole. On the other hand, I guess what you didn’t know then didn’t spoil your impure thoughts, huh? :-) Lumps of coal and switches for you, dude…
Au contraire, Pierre. Time dilation makes Santa’s instant, at near the speed of light, a much longer duration back home. Plenty of time for Mrs. Santa to write me a loving thank you note, and test drive the battery operated devices I sent her.
I’m not telling what she gave me.
Hiho Silver, Kemosabe.
Ohhh man, I got it backwards…you’re right (of course), and every year Santa goes on the trip he comes back and Mrs. Claus is, like, hundreds of years older (and all the folks he’s given presents to have been dead for hundreds of years? I’m obviously going to have rethink the Sleigh At The Speed of Light theory…) In any case, Mrs. and Mr. Claus must both be pretty magical. As for your memories…as far as I’m concerned…what happens at the North Pole STAYS at the North Pole…
I wouldn’t say I’m right, Joe. More along the lines of very, very wrong.
Joe, Xman and Indigo have a very MERRY CHRISTMAS and a HAPPY AND PROSPEROUS NEW YEAR. Hope Santa is good to you and that we will have another great year of laughs and exchange of wild and crazy opinions as well as walks down memory lane.
Merry Christmas, Pelmo!
Hey Guys,
Merry Christmas to you all, too.
I hate to sound like Michelle Obama, but this is the first New Year that I feel truly hopeful.
Hopeful for tangible reasons.
One of them is that my Mother got a lift from that photo of Obama on the beach, today (I was there for her reaction).
Hey, it’s progress for a white, conservative, predjudiced Mormon, Grandmother.
Pelmo- Who are you, and what have you done with the real Pelmo?
***Merry Christmas***one and all.
Indigo the grand kids have been mellowing me out, not as testy as I used to be.