Christmas is the quintessential season for giving birth to
traditions. And my family had many, like going to Baltimore’s Memorial Stadium
to buy our tree every year, shopping with our grandparents for presents for our
parents, giving one present on Christmas Eve. Like most families we left cookies
and milk for Santa. On Christmas morning, we had to wait for the
Santa-all-clear signal from our parents before we came down the stairs, peeking
through the banister on the way down. We saw the decorated tree for the first
time because that was Santa’s job.
Santa left his gifts organized under the tree so each one of
us had our own pile. Our parents wrapped
their presents for us but Santa didn’t wrap his, so we could see immediately
what was there.
I am the oldest of three girls born in 1944, 1947 and 1954. Before our youngest sister
Jaymie was born and when she was a baby, our maternal grandparents took my
middle sister, Nancy, and me shopping
every year before Christmas. We were given five dollars each for our mother and
father, twenty dollars total.
On the designated Saturday shopping day, we dressed up in
our Sunday clothes to go downtown to buy presents for our parents. For several
hours, with piped-in Christmas carols surrounding us, we checked out the
merchandise in Hutzler’s, Hecht’s, Stewart’s and the May Company. We admired
display windows with moving scenes, walked through fragrant aisles and rode elevators
controlled by black elevator operators wearing white gloves.
In spite of all the choices, every year Nancy and I always wound
up buying a tie or socks for our father and a nightgown or scarf for our
mother. Although our gifts lacked imagination, our parents always showed
surprise and delight at the gifts their daughters had given them.
This tradition of making a special day for shopping for our
parents helped teach us the joy of giving.
My parents also had another tradition. On Christmas Eve,
each of us was allowed to give one gift to each person in the family. Christmas
Eve was the special giving and that left Christmas Day for receiving Santa’s
gifts without any distractions.
When I was around nine or ten, as I was discussing the
shopping day with my grandfather, I told him I had an idea. I didn’t want to
give my father another tie or my mother another scarf. Instead, I wanted to
make a record for them, with me playing the piano and Nancy and me singing Silent Night. This was in the early 1950’s
when vinyl and record players were how we listened to music. We listened then
to 78 rpm records. After that 33 1/3 rpm and 45 rpm records were introduced. Would
an original record be possible, I asked? Would our combined twenty dollars
cover the cost of making a record?
His response, “Let me see what I can do.” A few days later,
he told me that we could produce a record and that the twenty dollars was
perfect. This is the only lie I ever knew my grandfather to say but, well, if
ever a lie were a good one, this was.
Nancy and I practiced and practiced, voices barely heard
over the piano which seemed to have only one tone—loud. The next Saturday, our
grandparents took us to a recording studio in Baltimore. I was too excited to
be nervous. I sat down on the piano bench with Nancy next to me and we
practiced some more as the engineer tweaked the sounds. Finally, we were told
the next time was the real thing. With
the microphone in front of our young faces, our voices wavered sometimes on
key, sometimes off.
A few days later, our grandfather handed us the final vinyl
so we could wrap our present. By that time, we could hardly contain our
excitement. We were going to give our parents a real record that we recorded.
Christmas Eve finally came, along with the anticipation and fanfare. We held our
breaths as we handed our parents the wrapped present. They had fun trying to
guess what it could be. I truly believe that they had no idea because they
seemed a little puzzled at first when they opened the package and then we
explained that it was a record we had made. They put it on the turntable and
listened to our faint voices singing Silent
Night with my clumsy piano playing. This is when the tears rolled down
their faces and met their smiles. In retrospect, their tears were the best
present because it showed us how much they cared and what a special present it
was that we had given to them.
Our grandfather gave us another present, one which could not
be wrapped. When I at first shared my
idea about making a record, he could have responded in the way that most adults
would have, “No, we have to stick with the traditional presents.” Instead, he
listened, considered and then helped us. He taught us to embrace possibilities.
