How Many Christmases?

As my Christmases become more senescent, I think more about the fact that God only gives us so many Christmases to celebrate if we live the average life expectancy in our country.

With each Christmas, people should not be looking for gifts, but should be thankful for being because life is a perfect gift for each of us, we should be grateful for what we have and for our families.

As a child, living under an atheist, communist regime, I decorated our pine Christmas tree with ornaments I made from colorful crepe paper and filled them with candy. I strung a garland made from shiny paper links glued together, the occasional cookie, an apple, a rare chocolate bar, and an orange. A few expensive glass ornaments were handled with care and hung on the more solid branches. Metal holders with small red candles were clipped to the outer branches. I was allowed to light up a few on Christmas Eve while mom supervised, to make sure that the tree and our apartment did not catch fire.

As I decorate our Christmas tree, it takes us much longer than it used to.  We start early and do a little bit each day and it may take two-three days, but the final result is beautiful. I take down a few boxes of ornaments and realize that I have collected way too many over the years, but which ones do I discard? Some have special meanings, and it is hard to part with them.

Gone are the live blue spruce trees that Mr. Alan used to set up in our living room year after year. Mr. Alan is smiling from Heaven because our tree is now artificial.  His trees smelled so fresh and divine and filled our house with the scent of Christmas and the visions of frost, icicles, and snow.

We watered the tree daily but our Tiger, a bottomless ‘camel,’ drank as much water as we added. At least he did not try to eat the ornaments or climb the tree to chew on the electric wire and lights. When the needles started falling, the wonderful fir smell persisted for a short while. Despite vacuuming, we still found sharp fir needles on the carpet late into the summer.

Christmas is a different time for many people. But the left has tried to diminish and destroy it by introducing the Elf on the Shelf and the non-Christian Kwanzaa started in 1966 after the Watts riots.

On a recent trip to Disney World, although there were a few large fir trees with ornaments and red and pink poinsettias everywhere, there was no reference to Christmas at all but there was ample reference to Kwanzaa.  A black choir sang on a large stage, entertaining visitors, and advertised Kwanzaa celebration on December 26. No mention whatsoever of Christmas.

The joyous Merry Christmas has been replaced by Happy Holidays, in a progressive attempt to be “inclusive,” and now by “Merry & Bright.” I am personally confused what is “merry” and what is “bright,” but it does not seem to bother other people who go about their daily lives ignoring it, until the ‘Merry Christmas’ practice disappears completely. The stores look bleak, almost no decorations to remind people of the celebration of a very important tradition for the western world – Christmas.

It is a special day for Christians and a spectacular day for all children around the world. They wait with bated breath for old man Santa Claus with his white beard and Ho, Ho, Hos, to bring them some desired toy they wanted all year long. This magical man embodied the selfless act of giving:  toys, food, warm clothes, health, love, familial peace, friendship, and joy.

The flying Santa Claus is a tradition, an idea, and a miracle man who can make that special wish come true for all children of the world, small and grown.

Christmas is now for me a time of reflection of our past, present, and the future. The previous Christmases have flown by, with my small family around a table laden with food and our happy children with their toys, and now alone with my husband.

Instead of giving gifts to baby Jesus each year, we chose the less fortunate children who placed their wishes in the Angel Tree at our local mall, and we gave gifts to children who eagerly expected the miraculous Santa to visit them while they slept peacefully in their beds.

Like them, we do not have much family left and those remaining are scattered around the globe. Only the idea of instantaneously traveling Santa Claus with his magical sleigh and the amazing flying reindeer could reach them all. Santa can squeeze through any chimney, avoid any fire, open any door, and eat billions of cookies left by children eager to please him.

But in the material chase to bring happiness to others and especially to children, we forget the simple pleasures of Christmas, love, laughter, being here and now, songs, prayer, and the presence of God in our lives.

Photo copyright: Ileana Johnson

 

Brimming with Christmas Spirit

Wikipedia photo

I recently met a young couple giddy with the jubilant spirit of Christmas. It was a rare encounter as Christmas traditions are under assault and condemned on the altar of progressivism and Islam. He wore a red and green elf vest and a Santa hat over his regular clothes and a big smile of good cheer. His lovely wife had donned a beautiful red dress with sparkling tinsel on the left collar. He told me how much he enjoyed Christmas and decorating trees which he left up every year late into January, even past the Russian Orthodox Christmas on January 6.

We started talking and I told them about our Christmas celebration and our fir tree, thin and puny on branches and ornaments, but high on spirits. They listened politely but then I realized from the expression on their faces and the look in their eyes that neither one could relate to the description that followed.  They were millennial young and recently married.

I told them how we decorated the blue spruce with real candles, apples, cookies, and home-made shiny paper ornaments, with a few and rare Bohemian glass ornaments, and how we lit the tiny candles every night for a few minutes - they were clipped as far to the outside branches as possible to avoid catching the tree on fire. To mom’s exasperation, Daddy would nail the base of the tree stand to the parquet floor. A few oranges, apples, and cookies were hung on each branch with colorful string, and chocolate bonbons and plump raisins filled home-made cardboard tiny baskets decorated with red and green crepe paper.

Larger cities decorated a huge tree in the center of town with colorful lightbulbs and organized a winter carnival with rides on St. Nicholas Day, December 6. New Year’s Day was a secular holiday decreed so by the Communist party but Christmas was not really a holiday at all.

People who lived in villages stuck to tradition and celebrated Christmas. Priests opened the modest and very cold churches for services on Christmas Eve. I attended services with my aunt Leana who was a deacon and a cantor. Churches in the mountainous areas were more active so far away from the prying eyes of communists.   

Caroling, donations of food to people less fortunate, and having an extended family meal to celebrate Christmas was the highlight of our year.  During certain days, we went from house to house with elaborately prepared plates of food and baskets of goodies for those less fortunate, widowed, old, or sick.

Villagers learned to care for each other in good times and bad.  They bartered services and things they had in excess with other neighbors since money was so tight. People learned to adjust to their communist-imposed poverty in so many creative ways.

My parents, my secret Santa (Mos Craciun), would put a small food item by my pillow which I would find on Christmas morning – an unwrinkled apple, a fragrant orange from Israel, a green banana from Greece, or a bittersweet chocolate bar. Christmas was good for us kids because we were oblivious to our state in life. We had no idea how hard adults struggled to make ends meet.

How could I make this well-off American couple understand that Christmas was a gift of prayer and time to be with the extended family to share love and abundant food that was otherwise missing the rest of the year?

Nobody can comprehend that an entire nation can be held hostage for decades and suffer so much in a fight for survival every day to find food we take for granted here, bread, milk, butter, flour, sugar, rice, cooking oil, and needful things such as toilet paper, vitamins, and basic medicines. It is hard to believe when the shelves in America’s grocery stores are brimming with food.

As Oleg Atbashian said in his book, Hotel USSR, after he legally immigrated to the U.S., he cried when he saw the abundance surrounding him, not tears of happiness, mind you, but of anguish for all the unnecessary and cruel pain the proletariat endured for decades at the hands of communist autocrats who enjoyed making the population suffer for many generations through constant shortages of food, long lines, lack of basic necessities like hot water, heat, having to depend on bribes, black markets, kickbacks, and bartering to survive.

An artist, Atbashian entered an art supplies store in Manhattan and wrote, “Rows upon rows of shelves brimmed with products that catered to every artistic need. No gatekeeper was checking permissions, and no Artists Union card was required to make a purchase… After the first floor, I went to the second, and then to the third. And then I imagined how different my life could have been and broke down in tears.”

Americans are so unappreciative of and spoiled by their abundance created through the hard work of many past generations, that they have no idea how other people live or that life can be any other way but good. But this American knows better and my Christmas spirit will always grow inside our Christian home and in my heart.

 

Christmas, the Season of Faith, Family, and Charity

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.

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.