children – Malcolm's Round Table

Every generation has its best memories of Christmas. Those with yearly holiday family reunions probably have lifetimes of scattered Christmas memories on a mental mix-tape of humorous and Kodak moments from many past years. I have many great memories, many of which recall Christmases celebrated with my wife.

My sense of Christmas celebrations, though, comes from the magic of December 25th as my parents conjured the day on an always-tight budget. We almost always had a spruce tree in a corner of the living room. The ornaments on it had been collected for many years by my father and mother and their parents. Since our Christmas tree lights were often lent to the schools we attended, our tree about December 25th went up after the lights came home from school.

Gifts arriving by mail, or delivered from in-town friends, went under the tree whenever they showed up. Ultimately, my two brothers and I would put gifts we bought for family members there. Most of the gifts showed up sometime between bed time on the 24th and when we were allowed to see the tree on the 25th.

On Christmas morning, the living room was kept dark until after breakfast. I could have done well enough with a bowl of Frosted Flakes. Mother always wanted to serve a full breakfast because (a) that’s what her mother and/or home economics classes taught her to do, (b) she really believed we would go hungry waiting for Christmas dinner if we didn’t start the day full, (c) this gave everyone’s anticipation time to build.

Some families seem to ring a starting bell after which everyone dives under the tree and opens his or her own gifts without paying much attention to what the others are doing. I like our tradition better: we took turns opening gifts as my father handed them out one by one. He engineered the whole thing so that the most spectacular gifts were opened last.

It’s hard for me to visualize Christmas any other way. As I got older, I realized how much work it was for my parents to create the magic. It was mainly for my brothers and I. After one becomes a parent, the focus changes on buying for one’s children, grandchildren, and friends. When families live in different parts of the country, this includes buying gifts early enough to wrap and mail them in time for Christmas.

Now, we’re the ones trying to conjure the magic. We can’t really re-create the Christmases we had when we were kids, though I think those long-ago days probably influence what our children experience–without the 78rpm records and movies on video tape. We have to give a wink and a nod to progress without turning the day into a commercialized mess.

I grew up in Florida where we seldom saw snow. Even so, this is how I still see Christmas--perhaps because of that song we all know. — **I grew up in Florida where we seldom saw snow. Even so, this is how I still see Christmas–perhaps because of that song we all know.**

I have no idea what songs kids listen to during the holidays now. I see that many of our old favorites such as “White Christmas,” which first appeared in the movie “Holiday Inn,” have been re-recorded by numerous singers since 1942. I grew up with Bing Crosby’s version, so that’s the one I like to hear. In part, I visualize Christmas as it was in “Holiday Inn” and the subsequent movie “White Christmas.” All this was, so to speak, the “what-Christmas-is-like standard” I was born into.

Later generations may see Christmas as it was in “The Polar Express” with Tom Hanks or “A Wonderful Life” with Jimmy Stewart or “Scrooged” with Billy Murray. A lot of people remember the hymns they hear in church or the carols they sing in high school choral productions or when they go caroling. Maybe their memories include “Jingle Bell Rock” and “Snoopy’s Christmas.”

You probably have your “this is Christmas” favorites of holiday movies and sings. How many of them come from what you saw at the theater or heard on the radio when you were in primary and secondary school?

I never could imagine what my parents might have listened to when they were children; I’m sure our kids can’t imagine what we listened to when we were young even though they can now Google about anything and see what was popular year after year. No doubt, somebody, somewhere has written a doctoral dissertation showing what percentage of Christmas songs kids listen to are brand new and what percentage are classics. I’m not going to go and look that up for this post.

I admit I’ve played Diana Krall’s Christmas album a lot since it came out ten years ago. I like jazz, and she does just fine with a fresh look at old favorites. I doubt that today’s youth is concentrating on jazz, so their Christmases will probably be formed out of other memories while their children last year and this year and next year. I like Christmas, Winter, and snow, so my memories come from childhood filled with spruce trees and movies and songs created before I was born.

We conjure Christmas for our children and for others who are special to us. Our perspective has shifted from “what am I going to get” to “what am I going to give.” As we grow up, we begin to understand the magic from inside out.

–Malcolm

In a recent writer’s blog post “Helping Your Child Find the ‘Inner Writer,'” author Misha Crews (Homesong) suggests ways parents can encourage children to discover and develop their writing talents. It’s wonderful reading if you’re a parent with a prospective young writer in the house.

One of her points is never criticize. “There are few things on earth more fragile than the creative spirit,” she says. “You’d be amazed at how easy it is to crush a burgeoning artistic impulse. A well-intentioned but careless comment from you could easily put your children off writing for quite some time.”

As I read that wonderful advice, I remembered how nurturing my parents were when they read the poems and other writing experiments my two brothers and I posted on the refrigerator door. Like the pristine refrigerator doors all over town, our’s soon became covered with recipes, notes from friends, doctor’s appointment cards and other memorabilia. At some point, my father began posting poems there. Many were short and humorous like:

Some poems diamonds are
That nothing can surpass,
But the jingles that I write
Are only broken glass.

Others were seasonal, focused on birthdays and anniversaries and current events.

Soon, my brothers and I were doing this, too. We often wrote poems about nature, including the large national forest south of town and the beaches of the north Florida Gulf coast. Even though our efforts didn’t always obey the laws of poetry–to the extent we understood them–they were praised. To our embarrassment, our parents started pointing out the publishing nature of the refrigerator door to friends, family coming through town, and even the TV repairman and others making service calls.

Initially, I think some readers were drawn to the output of The Refrigerator Door Publishing Company, Ltd. by the humorous quatrains of my father.

Like a postage stamp
On the wrong letter,
He married badly,
Knowing no better.

(I’m sure the fact that my mother was a good cook and kept the refrigerator well stocked with quality eating materials probably played in to the door’s high ratings.)

When my brothers and I weren’t feeling especially creative, we transcribed well-known poems from famous poets and posted them on sheets of paper with titles like POEM OF THE WEEK or WEEKLY VERSE or SONNETS FROM OLD BOOKS IN THE HOUSE.

The door was a blank slate, a continuing opportunity, an exciting playground for word games, and–when it came down to it–our first publishing house. Everyone read it and talked about it, and some people even remembered what they read there, especially when my father’s latest humor appeared:

His wife may lack brains,
Her beauty may dim,
But like good glue she’ll
Stick always to him.

The kitchen was a very encouraging environment: it was almost like a writer’s club or round table. The poems on the that door were a constant dance of words for over 30 years. When Crews speaks about a child developing his or her inner writer, she says “There are few things in life more gratifying than helping a child to achieve satisfaction and gain a sense of accomplishment and of his or her own self-worth.”

She could have been talking about my parents and the smiles and kind words that greeted each new work disseminated to the readers of the Betton Hills subdivision–and from there, Tallahassee and the world. Without The Refrigerator Door Publishing Company, Ltd., I might have ended up as a grave digger, street sweeper or a pickpocket.
–

Poems in this post Copyright (c) by Laurence R. Campbell.

Malcolm's Round Table

Tag: children

Christmas is, perhaps, mostly for our children

The Refrigerator Door Publishing Company, Ltd.