Christmas, the Season of Faith, Family, and Charity

Photo: Ileana Johnson

 Christmas was my Dad bringing home proudly a scraggly fir with sparse branches - fragrant with the smell of winter, tiny icicles hanging from the branches, miniature crystal daggers, melting on my mom’s well-scrubbed parquet floor. I never knew nor asked how he could afford it from his $70 a month salary that barely covered the communist subsidized rent, utilities, and food. No matter how bare the branches of my Christmas tree were, it was magical to me.

We decorated it together with home-made paper baskets filled with hard candy, raisins, and small butter cookies, crepe paper garlands, small pretzels, an orange wrapped in fine tissue paper coming all the way from Israel, a few apples dangling from a string, and 12 red and green 3-inch candles clipped carefully away from overhanging branches that could catch on fire.

Mom’s hand-stitched table cloth made a convenient tree skirt. 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.

I fell asleep and woke up every morning setting my eyes on the scented tree. It lasted two enchanted weeks before the dried needles fell all over the floor.

Christmas was lighting one of the 12 candles for a few minutes every night, careful not to set the tree on fire, basking in the soft glow while Daddy’s twinkly eyes were beaming with pride that he made his family happy once more. We were rich with love and God’s blessings.

Christmas was standing in shorter lines for freshly baked bread, butter, milk, cooking oil, flour, sugar, and the small pork roast mom always baked in the gas oven. Grandpa’s homemade smoked sausages with pretzels toasted on the stove top were always on the menu. Grandpa used to joke that life was so spectacularly good, even the dogs ran around with pretzels on their tails. Pretzels were sold by big bags, hard and stale, but toasting them on the stove made them taste just baked.

Christmas was Daddy opening the ceremonial bottle of red wine freshly brewed that year by cousin Mircea from Grandma Elizabeta’s vineyard grapes.

Christmas were the village carolers in hand-sewn folk costumes coming door to door, trudging through 3 ft. of snow, pulling a plough decorated with a real fir tree, singing traditional songs and snapping their whips in spite of the Communist Party moratorium, forbidding the observance of such religious traditions.

Christmas was sneaking at midnight to the village Orthodox Church with aunt Leana, the singing deacon, lighting candles and praying, surrounding the building when the crowd overflowed its tiny confines into the yard and the cemetery. The cold chilled us to the bone but the inside eventually warmed from our bodies, the candles, and the excitement of prayers and closeness to God.

Christmas was eating with my Mom and Dad, feeling full, happy, and loved in our tiny apartment, sometimes sharing meals with family members who had traveled far to be with us. The spare wool comforter aunt Nicuta had woven, a blanket, and set of sheets painstakingly hand washed would make cozy beds on the floor for the tired traveler – no fire place to light up, just the coils of steam heat which the government generously made sufficiently hot during Christmas to make up for the cold misery during the winter.

Christmas was peering in the shop windows at the glass ornaments we could not afford but I wished I had. They were made in Poland, whimsical fairy tale characters, no religious symbols of any kind, they were “verboten.”

Every Christmas I longed to have the same doll in the window at Omnia department store, dressed with miniature detailed  clothes, real curly hair, blue eyes, and eyelashes. I never asked my Dad because Mom said it cost three months of his salary. I still had my raggedy cloth doll aunt Stella, the village seamstress, had made for me when I was two years old. When my first child was born, Dad mailed her a large doll similar to the one I had longed for. The doll was so big, it stayed in a corner untouched. My spoiled children had too many other toys to play with and never appreciated the sacrifice their Granddad had made in sending such a gift of love.

On Saint Nicholas Day, December 6, 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 switches and another with candy and a chocolate bar. Chocolate was always in short supply and hard to find.

Photo: Ileana Johnson

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 garlands 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 Grandma’s traditional Christmas supper, roasted pork, 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 her 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.

When my children were born, Christmas became a tradition of toys and happiness seen through squeals of innocence and twinkly eyes when unwrapping a favorite game, book, toy, stuffed animal, or bike. I taught my children to be charitable and to share with other children who were less fortunate than we.

I decorate my Douglas fir with beautiful lights and shiny ornaments now. My heart fills with loving and longing memories of glowing Christmases past and of family members lost who made our Christian traditions so special.

I hope and pray that American Christmas traditions will be passed on to future generations to light up the season of faith, family, and charity.



Note: An abbreviated version of this article appeared in my first book, Echoes of Communism, 2010 edition.

Living in the 20th Century Communist Paradise

My husband inquired one day if I would have preferred to have lived in the 19^th century America or 20^th century Romania when communists ruled. I gave him a ‘I’m glad you asked the question’ look and launched into a tirade of what it was like living with my grandparents continuously for the first six years of my life before I went to first grade and then every summer until I was eighteen and able to choose for myself.

Most young Americans, blinded by school indoctrination, don’t realize that, under the socialist republic controlled by the Communist Party, population control and submission to their whim were the most important goals. They did not care about the happiness and health of the citizenry despite the heavy rhetoric to that effect.

A family was not allowed to move from the village to the city without proper permit from the Communists. If caught living in the city, a person would be subjected to fines, imprisonment, or both.

Mom’s parents, like all villagers, did not have electricity, running water, or indoor plumbing in the tiny village six miles outside of the largest metropolitan area in the south.

Natural gas, compressed in small containers called “butelie,” was used for cooking in summer time. In winter most villagers used a wood burning stove with an iron cast top for heat and cooking. Ducts would carry hot air to the next room. The two tiny rooms did not have taper candles for illumination but oil lamps with clear glass fluted covers that gave us the ability to walk in the house without groping in the dark.

When night fell, the stars were brilliant on clear nights, surrounded by the pitch blackness devoid of any ambient light.  It was fun for kids to catch lightning bugs or creep up on older folk sitting on stoops outside the fenced yard and listen to their gossip and tales of old. Younger neighbors, walking in the dark from the latest bus after a long day’s work, would stop and chat before they dragged their tired bodies home to eat and fall asleep with their work clothes on.

The village was compact, demarcations of living space done by communist party organizers with their directives from the top - no waste of agricultural land which needed to be planted with corn and wheat for export and survival rations of food. There was little space between homes, just enough for a wooden fence to separate one small house from the next.

Like 19^th century inhabitants, women did not have much in the vein of health care, save for the village mid-wife who tended to births. Women made do with strips of old clothing or rags to protect themselves during menses.

Toilet paper was either the communist newspaper, Scânteia (The Spark), or România liberă (Free Romania) attached to the wooden wall of the outhouse with a long nail. It gave us great pleasure to use the Communist Party’s propaganda to wipe our arses with. The newspaper, România liberă, communist propaganda rag from cover to cover, was a joke as nobody was free in Romania, we were prisoners of the totalitarian communist state. When far from any outhouse, we used the smooth side of any plant leaves we could find, especially corn ones.

Eventually the communists decided to modernize us and manufactured rough brown toilet paper with large and visible splinters in it. We were already used to splinters in our bums from sitting on the unfinished wood platform over the outhouse hole. But using toilet paper with splinters was a new experience. It would be surprising to learn what you can get used to in order to survive.

It never bothered us that we did not wash our hands or brush our teeth. We washed our faces before church but sported a neckline of dirt where the soap and water had stopped. It never occurred to us that hygiene was important to survival. We climbed in a fruit tree not far from the outhouse, buzzing with fat and hungry flies, and we ate with gusto the unwashed but ripen fruits called “dude.”

We played in the muddy ditches when it rained or when grandpa was watering his corn and garden and open the sluices of irrigation. We bathed in the creek or river when we went fishing. It was such a far walk that, when we came back after frolicking in the crystal-clear water, we were covered again in a serious layer of dust. Grandma told us to wash our feet and hands before we went to bed, but she was often tired and forgot to enforce the cleanliness rules. And nobody had a toothbrush or toothpaste.

Adults traveled to the city bathhouses once or twice a year for a good bath. Cleanliness is next to godliness but there was a shortage of bath soap and water was a precious commodity; we had to pump drinking water out of the ground. Taking a bath meant heating large amounts of water and a large enough tub which nobody owned nor could afford. Villagers who had relatives in the city with tiny cinder block apartments with running water traveled once a month or so to bathe if the water supply was running or was hot. As the 19^th century brethren would have said, they had a bath every so many months whether they needed it or not.

Grandpa had rigged a small tin tank near the outhouse, about five feet in the air. One person at a time could soap first and then rinse with the lukewarm water dripping from the tank; once empty, it had to be refilled; the sun would warm the water a little bit and the first person was the lucky bather. It was an amazing experience to get rid of the mud and dirt even if it was so short-lived.

We went barefoot most of the time in summer, the yard was a mess, covered with geese, chicken, and duck poop which squished between our toes. I have an icky feeling to this day when I go barefoot. I seldom go without shoes except in sand, and I refuse to go camping.

A few of my childhood friends died of untreated hookworms. Those who survived got treated with heavy and nasty-tasting medicinal syrup provided by my mom who made determined trips to the government polyclinic in town.

I suppose we lived a tad better than the 19^th century America as we at least had a rickety bus with holes on the floorboard for transportation or we had rusty trains with steam locomotives that covered us in a decent coating of dark and smelly coal soot. And we did have some drugs and vaccines which increased our chances of survival.