A Child's Visit to Boston and other memories

Cleaning out drawers today in preparation for getting furniture ready to move for the new carpeting job. (Carpet will be "Native Colors" a soft brown in Karastan's "Divisadero" line, with little flecks of red and blue-gray in the brown, to help hide stains.)

Found a little collection of my daughter's souvenirs of her trip to Boston, Massachusetts, when she was about 6 or 7, when my sister was working at the M.I.T. library, and my mother made her a visit. It seemed a perfect opportunity to give our daughter the experience of an important historical American city to which she has some very old family ties, especially with her grandmother there to retrace some of the ancestral footsteps.

My mother first went to Boston with her mother just before World War II. My grandfather decided his wife needed a break, but he couldn't go with her.

It was the year that her only nephew, Carl Beyer, had died in a car crash, and she had spent months "being strong" for her widowed sister, Carl's mother, and Kay, Carl's young wife, who had two small children.

It was also the year that my mother, approaching 30 and still childless after nearly 10 years of marriage, had suffered yet another miscarriage.

It seemed the perfect time to send these two women away, to give them time to make an extended car trip "back East" to visit friends and family. I believe they set out in June or July and returned at the end of November. They were able to put four new tires on the car just two weeks before Pearl Harbor day, and the onset of rubber rationing.

During that trip East, my grandmother had been able to visit the small Wadsworth family cemetery in New York state where her father's mother was buried, and take away with her, at the cemetery keeper's suggestion, the wedding picture of her maternal grandmother (a small metal daguerrotype) that was loosely set in the tombstone above her grave. (This grandmother, Sarah Elmina Wadsworth Butler, had died young, leaving her baby son, Marsden Butler, to be raised by a pair of childless aunts.)

With this Wadsworth connection, of course my little daughter came home with a book of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's poems for children, but she also had a full tour of the House of Seven Gables, climbed the steps of Bunker Hill, made a little wooly sheep at Old Sturbridge Village, visited Old North Church (and heard about Paul Revere's ride), and "helped" her grandmother piece a quilt. Quite a series of adventures for a young child! And today I found the little paper bag of all her souvenirs. Of course I will put it away until her next visit, when she can choose for herself what is most precious to her.

And I also tucked inside the bag her very first report card from kindergarten, showing that she was learning well, but was a little shy. Probably just the way she is today.

I wish her well on all her adventures in her new marriage and her new home in Germany. Visiting Boston was only the first step in a life of travel, it seems!

Birdwatching in Texas

A visit from my sister (the dedicated birdwatcher) and her partner (the even more dedicated birdwatcher) has given us two days of trying to find birds in the dead of winter, and has taught us the following facts:

1. Of approximately 700 bird species in the United States, there are approximately 600 to be found in Texas. So our Texas bird book is actually pretty comprehensive.

2. Many of our species overwinter in Mexico and points south, and are not to be found here at this time of year.

3. The City of Austin Wastewater Treatment ponds are in rural Hornsby Bend, and are set up as a bird sanctuary, primarily for water birds that overwinter here. We saw lots of ducks, grebes, coots...

4. If we want to do this on our own, we will have to get some binoculars. The naked eye does not suffice.

Flood Day

Disaster today--of a small kind. An open tap, a clogged sink, some inattention, and a flood that covered the bathroom and progressed down the hallway. We've been saying for years that we need to replace the old carpeting. It was installed about 30 years ago, and has been looking increasingly shabby, but the thought of boxing all the books, emptying all the drawers and moving all the furniture was just a bit much.

Now, I guess we'll have to do something. Three goes with the water-sucking vacuum, and the carpet is still squishy underfoot. It's getting late; we will try again tomorrow.

Watch this space for developments!

How did St. Nicholas become Santa Claus?

A friend from Germany once asked me how St. Nicholas (ascetic Bishop of the early church in Asia Minor, feast day Dec. 6th, known as the patron saint and protector of children) became Santa Claus (jolly old elf with red suit, a big round tummy and a chuckling laugh, flying the world on Dec. 25th with 8 tiny reindeer, or 9 if NORAD's reports are to be believed).

In Germany, gifts are apparently left under the tree by the Christ Child, and St. Nicholas has a separate role at the beginning of the Christmas season, while the Wise Men end the Christmas celebrations on January 6th--just one month from St. Nicholas' day.

Santa Claus is a uniquely American character, rising out of a uniquely American history.

Simply put, the earliest English settlers who came to what we call New England did not celebrate Christmas. They scorned the traditional English Christmas--feasting and caroling and wassailing and other such celebratory actions were just pagan nonsense, dressed up in a highly suspect Christian guise. They were Puritans, remember, and they wanted to purify their church: no carved gargoyles, no incense, no gold-embroidered vestments. And especially no parties at Christmas. If it is one of the holiest days on the Christian calendar, then surely Christians ought to be at church, on their knees, repenting of their sins rather than piling up new ones.

At least that was the thinking. And so celebrating Christmas was formally outlawed in Massachusetts (the oldest New England colony) from 1689 until 1856. By the time the girls in Louisa May Alcott's Little Women were coming down to breakfast to find Christmas presents on their table, Christmas celebrations had been legal for less than a generation in the author's home state.

Of course, the Puritans and their descendants did not all stay in Massachusetts. The inexorable pull of the west meant that some of them eventually drifted into New York--the colony that had once been Dutch. And they began bumping into Dutch Christmas customs: gingerbread cookies and Sinter Klaas, among others.

The descendants of Puritans had no remnants of "Father Christmas" in their handed-down English traditions. Christmas was for them a day of prayer, and Saint Nicholas/Sinter Klaas/Santa Claus came to them as a tradition of the newly-amalgamated American nation, a tradition first borrowed from Dutch origins and put into American form in 1823 (with numerous reprintings thereafter) in the poem called "A Visit From Saint Nicholas" by Clement Clarke Moore, who had been educated at New York's Columbia University. By 1870, Moore's St. Nicholas had been transmuted into the department-store Santa Claus at Macy's, a flagship Manhattan store both then and now.

The change from Sinter Klaas to Santa Claus--from a Dutch celebration of an ancient saint's feast day to an American celebration of Christmas--happened in the 19th century, and by the age of television in the 20th century, our own American Santa Claus was ready to conquer the world, one child at a time...

Which proves that festivities in the dark of the year have a certain attraction for us all, even the descendants of Puritans.

Winter Solstice

Last night the wind was blowing, the temperature was dropping, and I was thinking, "Thank goodness I don't have to go out tomorrow!" Today the sun is shining, taking off that 27-degree chill quite rapidly, and it might actually become a nice day. But I still don't have to go out if I don't want to... I can sit in my pajamas with the cat at my feet and try out this new blog.

Here in Texas the turning of the seasons is not quite the big deal it becomes further north. We have 80 degree weather until one day a "blue norther" blows in, and suddenly it becomes winter for a few days. But we never have to put away the short-sleeved shirts, or put on the snow tires.

We celebrate, however, in the same ways our northern ancestors did. A tree with lights. A carol service. Candles and spiced wassail. Yet a few southern traditions, more in keeping with the weather, belong to us too. A posadas procession. Luminarias along the edge of a pathway. A pinata for the children and long, slow barbecue for dinner.

Season's Greetings to all!