OP-ED: Over the river and through the woods
Christmas Eve in our house wasn’t complicated, but it was a sacred family tradition. My brother and I were altar boys, and this was the main event of church services for the year.
For my brother and me, Dec. 24 meant putting on freshly laundered red cassocks and starched and ironed surplices. These were our special-occasion uniforms. We thought we looked a little goofy, but the moms and grandmas saw us as angels. I’m guessing that perspective is everything.
Before we could even leave the house, Dad had his own ritual. He would crawl around on the frozen red-dog driveway, wrestling snow chains onto the two nearly-bald rear tires of our old Plymouth. Of course, this was before he put on his suit. If we stood close enough to him, pretending to “help,” we’d often learn new vocabulary words we’d never hear at Mass.
For those of you who don’t know, red dog wasn’t a pet or a beer. It was the reddish clinkers left behind after coal waste from the mining piles had spontaneously combusted. It was a coal connoisseur’s blend of shale, sandstone, clay and bony coal, the kind so full of impurities it never made it to the tipple.
Once the chains were on, we headed “over the river and through the woods,” only this was not the Christmas card version. This was 4 miles of unpaved country roads. It was pitch-black, and it twisted through the hills like a medieval calf path. By the time we arrived at our grandparents’ little bungalow, Grandad would be standing there in his only suit, and Grandma was in her best dress with a black pillbox hat and a tiny veil that made her look like she was going to the Vatican.
Mass was always a mixture of incense, holy water, hymns in Latin and processions that were magnificently dramatic on Christmas Eve. After the final blessing, Dad drove the six of us back down the slippery North Dawson hill toward home for the traditional mini-feast of the night: ham sandwiches, potato salad, hot chocolate for us, coffee for the grownups, red or green jello with fruit cocktail suspended inside, and Christmas cookies of every possible shape and size.
At the beginning of the meal came the holiday “toasting wine,” a shot-sized glass of Mogen David or red currant wine. I always suspected Grandad would have preferred his homemade Chianti, or at least an Iron City, but my maternal grandmother was a teetotaler, and it was still her house.
The gift-opening part of the night was modest. Each grandchild got one present, a crisp $5 bill. For a man who worked for minimum wage as a gardner at $1 an hour, those gifts represented 10 hours of his life. And in today’s dollars, that five would be about $57. We didn’t know any of that then. We just felt rich.
Around 1:30 a.m., Dad would drive his parents home while my brother and I crawled into our big double bed where we tried to sleep. By morning, the lower half of our bedroom windows would be frosted over with the most beautiful designs nature could make. When we woke up, we’d argue about who got to sit over the hot-air register to get dressed while Dad fired up the basement coal furnace.
Then came the big moment: tearing down the stairs to see what waited under the tree. The smell of Maxwell House percolating with Mom rattling around the kitchen while we gathered around the tree to open presents. It was the soundtrack of childhood.
The last big Christmas I remember as a kid, my big present was a toy moving van. Ironically, I’ve moved at least a dozen times since, and not once did that truck ever show up to help.
Some traditions fade, but the memories? They stick like red dog to a cold driveway.
Nick Jacobs lives in Windber.