The Magic That Was

The thing I miss the most from my childhood is the way Christmas felt…or rather, the way I felt at Christmas time.

I imagine it was the same for most kids whose families celebrated Christmas. The world seemed to quiet down and, for one day, seemed to slow to a snail’s pace outside. Inside it was usually pretty hectic.

Christmas was always marginally spiritual for me. The holiday was really about getting two weeks off from school and getting tons of presents with one or two really good ones in the mix. Santa Claus was as real to me as my father, only I didn’t realize early on just how close I was in that reasoning!

The excitement leading up to The Big Day was always so palpable, so intense that I trembled at the thought of opening all of my presents that lay beneath the tree, the specific location of each I knew from the repeated excavation projects I had undertaken with my siblings when my parents weren’t looking.

We lived in a very small house. At one point there were seven kids and my parents, all squeezed into a three-bedroom house. As the youngest, I’m told I slept “wherever.” Maybe that’s why I have a wanderlust: I never had a room truly to myself. Even when all my siblings had all grown up and moved out, my oldest sister had gathered up her two kids, left her diseased marriage and moved back in with Mom and Dad and me. Through the Air Force and college dorm life, I never had a room of my own until I was 25, sharing a house off-campus with four other guys, and no place of my own until I took a one-bedroom apartment a year later. But that’s beside the point.

Our small house had a natural gas furnace, so a fireplace was something that existed only in storybooks and movies. And Christmas poems. Every poem, song and story that mentioned Santa Claus included the depiction of his entry into the home via the fireplace. Still clear in my head is the concern I had for Santa (and the presents that were due me!) because we didn’t have a fireplace through which for him to come in. Of course, I had older siblings who had every explanation from “he has a huge key ring with keys for every house without a fireplace,” to “he climbs in through a window,” to “he’s not coming for you.” Yes, that last one was my brother. And, with no snow on the ground – as it often happened in Chicago – how was Santa going to get his sleigh here? My parents put a stop to my questioning with a simple reassurance that Santa knew how to get into our house. He would be there!

As a large family with a diluted Italian heritage, Christmas Eve was always a grand event. I never understood it – still don’t to this day – but, as Catholics, we fasted on Christmas Eve the way Catholics fasted on Fridays: we ate fish. Mom knocked herself out at the grocery store a few days before, buying tons of fresh-water perch, shrimp, calamari and smelt. Christmas Eve always started early for her, as she would begin thawing the shrimp, squid and smelt, clean them, and start making the pasta dough for the Christmas Day dinner. In later years my sisters would help her, but Mom still did the bulk of the cooking.

By mid-afternoon the smelt were battered and frying and the squid was being cut into bite-size pieces. Guests were arriving – early on it was aunts, uncles and cousins; later it was my adult sisters with their husbands and children. The house was always a loud, exciting, electric place, and always, my eyes and thoughts were on the ever-growing pile of presents tucked under the Christmas tree. Mom would unload cookie-sheet-loads of battered, fried seafood into large serving bowls and everyone would load up their plates and chow down! Everyone, that is, except me. I hated fish of all kinds, fish sticks notwithstanding. I later discovered I liked the smelt because you can eat it, bones and all. That’s why I hated perch; you had to watch out for those pesky bones! And shrimp made me queasy.

All that excitement, and my paradoxically empty stomach, did little to prepare me for the coming night. Well into my teens I could never get a good night’s sleep on Christmas Eve for the exhilaration and anticipation for all those presents and what “Santa” might bring by the next morning. Even being dragged to Midnight Mass each year for most of my childhood didn’t make me tired enough – or bored enough – to make me sleepy. Once back at home, Mom and Dad were suspiciously not readying for bed, and insisting that we kids get to bed right away.

I would lie awake through most of the night. When I was little I would listen for the tiniest sound that would indicate Santa’s presence. As an older, wiser child, I listened for the telltale signs of Mom and Dad dragging out Santa's loot to put under the tree. If there ever was magic in that house, it was in my parents’ ability to sneak around and move all those toys and games into place without my ever hearing them, but even more so to have hidden so much stuff in such a tiny house without us kids ever finding it…and we LOOKED!

Finally, after an agonizing night of cat-napping and waking, tossing and turning, the sky through the windows turned from black to purple to deep blue. It was still dark outside, but it was officially morning! Sometimes I was the first to make it to the living room, sometimes it was my sibling closest in age to me, my brother, six years older. All the lights in the house were off, save for the blinking Christmas tree lights, which cast a purplish glow to the room. Mom and Dad always turned the tree lights off at bedtime, except on Christmas Eve. The tree was already the natural focal point of the room, but the light it gave off was touched by magic on Christmas morning, and it held more power and magnetism in that moment than it ever did in the evenings before.

By sunrise all of us kids were up. (By the Christmas of my earliest memory, my two oldest siblings had already moved out and started their adult lives, so there were five of us then.) There seemed to be an unwritten rule that we not touch any of “Santa’s” presents, unwrapped as they were, until Mom or Dad was awake. Sometimes it was blatant, with excited reports to my groggy, sleepy parents in their bed about what Santa had brought us; and sometimes it was more subtle, with excited talking and jumping around – or fighting, as siblings usually do – but we did what we could do to get them to wake up so we could dive into the toys. With another long day of cooking on her agenda, Mom was always up first.

As I grew older, that was one of my first clues about Santa Claus. For the 364 other days of the year Dad always espoused and exemplified the importance of getting up early and getting the day started. Even on Sundays, when his barbershop was closed, he was usually up by 8:00 because he always had something or other to do. But on Christmas morning he always seemed too tired to get up. As my powers of deduction began to develop, I became more and more suspicious of Santa Claus’s true identity.

But Dad would eventually be convinced to wake, and he would walk to the thermostat and, usually frugal where the utilities were concerned, he would turn it up to what had to be 75 to 78 degrees, and the house would be toasty warm while we tore into our presents. It’s one thing about Christmas that has never changed in my eyes: the gift-opening chaos. The more little kids there were, the louder and more chaotic the event. There was always a knee-deep pile of torn, discarded wrapping paper covering the whole living room floor. As my sibs and I grew older and more tidy, there came the nieces and nephews, which just made for even more noise and paper, and the cycle continues.

Mom would spend most of her time in the kitchen, working on the family feast. It alternated each year between traditional turkey and dressing with all the traditional trimmings, or homemade gnocchi with my Italian grandmother’s recipe tomato “gravy,” or Gramma’s recipe ravioli with gravy. Mom was not Italian; she learned Italian cooking from her mother-in-law, the way her mother-in-law did it. So that meant, no matter which dish was the main course, there was always enough food for an army to overeat, which made up for my Christmas Eve fasting. Everyone always ate too much and then fought over the couch for the best place to nap.

And I could never figure out why I slept so soundly on Christmas night!

If Christmas Day was the most exciting day of the year, then the very next day had to be the most boring. Call it adrenalin withdrawal, or the big letdown, but it was an agonizing, long day. All I had left to look forward to was the freebie night to stay up as late as I wanted to a week later to count down to the new year, and then the resumption of school…and a whole year before the next Christmas.

I have to hand it to Mom and Dad; for a poor couple raising a large family, they certainly knew how to pull out enough stops to make our Christmases seem bountiful.

Life goes on, and I eventually grew up and left home for the Air Force, returned home, left home for school, returned home and, finally, shortly after Mom passed away, I left home for good and began my career. In those years away from home I realized how truly commercial the Christmas season is, how it creeps further and further back into the year to where Christmas-themed ads are playing a week or two before Halloween. And where the holiday's spiritual meaning had a tenuous hold on me even as a child, since then my point of view and my beliefs have sharpened, and that spiritual meaning has been discarded. With Mom gone it could never be the same, anyway.

I am by no means a Scrooge, however. I still get caught up in the songs, in the gift-giving (though I don’t get crazy about it) and in the fellowship of family and friends. The traditional foods, now in the hands of my sisters, are still consumed or sought after, and their smells and tastes can still bring back the memories of Christmases past. And I can eat fish and shrimp without gagging.

But Mrs. Farrago and I haven’t put up a tree since our first Christmas together. The glow of the lights in the morning just seemed hollow, despite our efforts and our first holiday Together. The decorating – and especially the undecorating – seemed more chore than joy, and the pressures of whose family to visit when only seemed to take the pleasure out of the journey.

I still get a kick out of the glee in the faces of the nieces and nephews as they tear into a present, especially if they find that it’s one they really wanted. But there’s also a twinkle in their eyes that seems to say this is how it’s supposed to be; it seems as though, despite their families’ own spiritual bases, the kids are losing the message that it’s more about giving than it is about receiving. I got it when I was their age. Right? Didn’t I?

As adulthood trickled into my bones and brain, the special joy that was Christmas morning trickled out. It became quite clear to me that it is and, certainly for my entire life, has always been a child’s holiday, intended to be filled with warmth, magic, abundance and joy.

I hope kids today feel that same magic.