Nicholas Howe [12/28/2002]

By Nicholas Howe

Last week a woman told the radio audience that "I'm Dreaming of a White Christmas" was her favorite carol. This surprised me I'd never thought of that song as a Christmas carol. It was a Tin Pan Alley song by a professional hit-writer for a movie called "Holiday Inn," which told a drippingly sentimental story about a young Connecticut couple who were struggling to manage an inn. I saw the movie when it was new and I didn't think it was a very good movie, or a very good song, either. Bing Crosby had the hit version and he was known as "The Groaner." The other favorite version was by Mel Thorme, who was known as "The Velvet Fog." Associations like that do not lend themselves to carol making. The same interview also saluted "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer," which is not a carol, it's a novelty number. The woman also said kind things about a Christmas song by Alvin and the Chipmunks, an entry whose name has, mercifully, escaped me. Not, however, the song. It was wedged into my memory by a long December drive to Colorado and back when the Chipmunks had about every third play on the radio, twenty-four hours a day. I barely survived. It was only strengthening thoughts of "Adeste Fideles" and "Joy to the World" that got me through.Christmas used to be the occasion for purposes that are now lost. In those older and gentler times, polite people took a bath twice a year, the one on Christmas Eve and the other one. Everyone in the family used the same bath water, in order of age. Progress came to North Conway late in the 19th century, and Harvey Gibson's family established one of the benchmarks: they had the second privately-owned bathtub in town. Every weekday, Harvey would make his way to his studies at Fryeburg Academy, partly on the train, partly walking, and he liked to take a bath before he started. The bathtub was in an upstairs closet, but there was no plumbing for it, so Harvey hauled water to fill the tub before he went to bed and took his bath in the morning. In winter, he'd break the ice with the heel of his shoe. This was advanced thinking; there wasn't a bath tub in the White House until 1908, the year that my father graduated from college. Later on, he presided over our family's Christmas day, which was complicated, even heroic. For us, Christmas had three parts. It began at our house in western Massachusetts, then moved to one Boston suburb, and then moved to another Boston suburb. This took some doing, because our family never had a car. Bart Boyden had a two-door Chevrolet, and he took us to the train station in Greenfield. He made our other necessary trips, too, and late one afternoon he was taking several of us and our cat Lucky to the veterinarian in Greenfield. His car radio was on and the program was interrupted to tell us that the Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor.On Christmas morning we'd have our stockings and family presents in Deerfield, then Bart Boyden would take the five of us and two large collections of presents, but not Lucky, to the train station in Greenfield. Then it was 90 miles east through Orange, Athol, Gardner, Fitchburg, Leominster, and Ayer, with a giant chair beside the tracks at one of the towns to show that chairs were made there. The names also occurred, surprisingly, in one of Rudyard Kipling's stories that we had. His books were all set in England or India, and hardly any readers knew that he spent many summers in Brattleboro, Vermont. He'd take the train from Greenfield to Boston and he had a character in some distant land say those names for an inside literary joke.We'd get off near Waban and grandfather Burnham would meet us with his majestic Franklin automobile. He'd take us to his house for a large Christmas gathering of my mother's parents and her four sisters and all those cousins, and all the presents involved on that side of the family. An army commission signed by Abraham Lincoln hung in the stairway and grandfather Burnham was an air raid warden in this new war, so I'd slip through the overcoats in the huge front hall closet and look at his white steel helmet that hung there, ready to protect us in case of need.In the afternoon we'd be transported across several suburbs to another house in West Newton. This could have been a medium-sized town all by itself, with a Greek/German couple living in one part and father's mother and aunt on the third floor and his sister and her family elsewhere. There'd also be father's brother and his other sister and their spouses and children and one other grandparent who'd come up from Providence, also a throng of what we called loose connections anchored by The Wheeler Girls, two women in rustling black dresses who were ancient beyond calculation, may or may not have been sisters, and always sat in the same little divan in the multi-parted living room.There were more presents here, and several rituals. One was to go up to the third floor with Auntie Anna, who was really our maiden great aunt. She had a huge trunk holding what she called conundrums, which were really riddles, and she'd read some to us and see if we could guess them, which we never could. Auntie Anna always knit me a pair of mittens for Christmas, but she was a slow knitter and only one would be done on time, so I'd get the other one for my birthday. This came in April, so I'd have a pair of beautiful new mittens ready for summer. My hands would be too big for them by the next winter, so I'd get another mitten for Christmas, its mate for my birthday in April, and so on. Somewhere deep in family storage I have numerous pairs of beautiful new mittens, still ready in case of need.Presents took a long time at this third stop of Christmas day, then there'd be a huge buffet that was a specialty of aunt Harriet, with aunt Louise pouring tea and coffee from a silver service. Chet Williams was always there, too. He was president of the New England Conservatory of Music and he'd sit down at the grand piano and play Christmas carols for people to sing. "I'm Dreaming of a White Christmas" was written partway through the war and he didn't play it. "Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer" came later, and he didn't play that, either. This was, after all, Christmas. Nicholas Howe is a writer from Jackson.