A Child's Christmas in Nashville

It's well regarded that Christmas, as we Americans practice it, is a special time for children. Children see the magical aspect of everything, but especially Christmas.

One of the things that I try to do, each year, is to recover the ways I felt as a child in Nashville, during the Christmas season. I know now that I imbued the things I saw with magical qualities back then, but at the time I thought that the magic was in the things.

The feeling of Christmas started for me early in the fall, when the weather became chilly and the winds blew the leaves off the trees. At school, we kept our minds off the darkening days outside by reading stories and drawing pictures about, first, Halloween, then Thanksgiving, and finally Christmas.

We got ideas by reading Play Mate magazine which was written, each month, by Esther Cooper and illustrated by Fern Bisel Peat. I was especially taken with "A Tale of Peter Pig", a story written in rhyme, each time, by Cooper about some pigly adventure, in keeping with the season. Every installment began in the same way: "Now, Peter Pig decided..." At Christmas, there were adventures with snow and sharing winter cheer and singing carols.

Nowadays, we hear Christmas carols sung constantly at Christmastime, but in school we sang them. The song that, for some reason, always takes me back to those times is this one:

Up on the rooftop,
Click, click, click!
Down through the chimney
With good Saint Nick!

I remember, once, during these early days, my father took me to a barber shop on West End Avenue on Christmas Eve. It was around 6 o'clock, but already dark outside, where wisps of snow were threatening to become something more.

I don't remember whether I got a haircut, or my father did, but there was a radio playing behind the barber, and at one point the program was interrupted by an announcement that Santa Claus had been sighted, making his way toward Nashville. Both the barber and my father made a big deal out of that with me. At the time, I was old enough to be skeptical about Santa Claus, but young enough to be impressed that the news was coming over the radio. When we left the shop, I thought that it was awfully cold out to be riding a sleigh through the air, but at Christmas, the idea was exciting.

Christmastime, then, was a time for going out, despite the cold. A special treat was going downtown to look in the windows of the department stores. We would always look in the window of the Krystal on Church Street to see the doughnuts coming out of the doughnut machine.

Sometimes, we would end up eating at the Krystal, but in those years when the Spirit of Christmas Present had smiled on our family, we would go around on Union to the B&W for a treat. We would walk down the cafeteria line, salivating like Cratchits, before the bounty of food that was laid out. There were several kinds of everything! I always got the fried haddock, which I covered with ketchup.

After such a fine repast, we would once again brave the chilly winds outside, but not without stopping at the window of the B.H. Stief Jewelry company. At Christmas, and at no other time, there were the most marvelous automatons on display in B.H. Stief's windows. Mechanical figures of firemen or farmers, or what not (there was a new display every year), driven by some invisible, but intelligent force to put out the fire or milk the cow, or what not.

In the eighth grade, we put on the Christmas Pageant and tried out, in our own declaiming, the great cadences of Luke:

And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field,
keeping watch over their flock by night...

And Carolyn Suter played the Twelfth Street Rag on the piano.

And I have a memory of being on the fourth floor of Loveman's with my mother, near Christmas, when the elevator door opened and a band of carolers stepped out, singing "Adeste Fideles" for everyone there.

And on our televisions, we watched "Amahl and the Night Visitors."

And one night, we saw Buzz Evans sing "O Holy Night" on TV.

Christmas was everywhere celebrated and observed, then. Now, it isn't. It's getting hard, even, to find Scrooge during this season. We have, instead, "The Grinch Who Stole Christmas" and "A Christmas Story", and we may think there's no magic in them. And we may feel sorry for our children. But our children continue to do what children always do. They put the magic in.