No
matter how bare the branches of my Christmas tree were, it was magical to me. Two
metal bars forged by hand helped Dad nail the tree to the floor at the foot of
the couch where I slept in the living room that doubled as my bedroom. Our tiny
apartment only had one bedroom where my parents slept.
Decorating
it was a fun job every year since I made new decorations from colorful crepe
paper. We had to be creative; we could not afford glass ornaments. We made
paper cones covered with craftily rolled crepe paper and filled with candy. I
hung small apples with red string, tiny pretzels, home-made butter cookies, candied
fruit, raisins, and an occasional orange wrapped in tissue paper with strange
lettering, coming all the way from Israel. Each year we bought 12 small red and
green candles which we attached to the tree with small metal clips. We were
careful to clamp them at the tip of the branch to keep the tree from catching
fire when the candles were lit. The tree would live for two weeks before the
prickly needles fell all over the living room floor.
One
year I spent Christmas with uncle Ion and his wife. A gifted mechanical engineer,
Ion could fix and build anything. He promised that he would fashion lights for
his Christmas tree. He worked painstakingly for weeks, soldering tiny copper
wires into bundles that stretched along the branches of the tree like a magical
cascade to which he soldered at least 200 tiny bulbs sold as bike lights. It
was a labor of love! When the wires were finally attached to a relay, the bulbs
lit up like a waterfall. Nobody had such a fantastically blazing tree in the
whole country. I was amazed at his dedication and craftiness and never forgot his
fairytale Christmas fir.
We
did not have a tree skirt but we used one of Mom’s hand-stitched table cloths.
The whole apartment smelled like the fragrant mountains and, for a couple of
weeks we forgot the misery that surrounded us. We lit up the 12 candles on
Christmas Eve and on Christmas Day.
Every
night for two weeks, I would admire my enchanted tree until I fell asleep,
wondering what special treat I would find under my pillow on Christmas morning.
It was never much, but it was such a cherished joy!
Saint
Nicholas Day was celebrated on December 6th. We really didn’t know
much about the real St. Nicholas, Santa Claus’s namesake. St. Nicholas was a
popular saint in the Orthodox Church and presumed the bishop of Myra in Turkey
in the 300s. There were many legends of St. Nicholas - the more famous story
that he was the son of a wealthy family in Patara, Lycia. When his parents
died, he gave away his fortune. One such random act of kindness involved throwing
three bags of gold through the windows of three girls who were going to be
forced into prostitution.
On
Saint Nicholas Day, I would put my boots outside the door, hoping that they
would be filled with candy in the morning and not coals. Grandpa had a wicked
sense of humor – he would sometimes fill one boot with sticks and another with
candy and a chocolate bar.
Grandpa
never bought a blue spruce - we cut a fir tree from the woods. We were careful
not to cut down a tree that had bird nests in it. We decorated it with garland
made from shiny and multi-colored construction paper. We cut strips, glued them
in an interlocking pattern and voila, we had our garland. For ornaments we used
walnuts and shriveled apples from his cellar, tied with Grandma’s red knitting
wool.
The
warm adobe style fireplace built from mud bricks mixed with straw cast a
dancing glow on the tree decked with tokens of food, something our heathen Roman
ancestors did during the celebration of Saturnalia. On December 17, the polytheistic
Romans celebrated Saturnus, the god of seed and sowing, for an entire week. As
Christians, we celebrated the birth of Christ and the religious traditions in
our Orthodox faith, in spite of the communist regime forcing the transformation
of Christmas into a secular holiday.
On
Christmas Eve, after we ate Mom’s traditional Christmas supper, roasted pork, baked
chicken, sarmale (stuffed cabbage rolls with ground meat and rice), and
mamaliga (corn mush with butter cooked in a cast iron pot), we went to the
midnight service at the Orthodox Church not far from our house. Sometimes it
was a sloshy trek and other times it was icy and slippery. If we got lucky, a
heavy snow would turn our walk into a winter wonderland with dancing snowflakes
shining in the weak street lights. We had to bundle up well – the church was
not heated and we circled it three times during the procession with burning
candles in our hands. I always wore my flannel pajamas under many layers of
warm clothes. To this day, pajamas are my favorite garment – cozy and
comfortable, keeping my body warm.
I
decorate my Douglas fir with beautiful lights and shiny ornaments now. My heart
fills with loving memories of Christmases past and of family members lost who
made our Christian traditions so special.
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