When I thought of writing about “A Jersey Shore Christmas,” I realized I’d actually done it several years ago, when my grandson, then age 8, was collecting family history narratives from all his grandparents for his Cub Scout Bear Trail badge. One of the questions was, “What did you do as a child during the holidays?”
My response started out, “Christmas was the biggie.” The rest of this post is adapted from the essay I wrote for him then.
Our Christmas actually started with Thanksgiving - and anyone who denies that it began so early back in the "old days" or blames Hallmark for rushing the season is mistaken. We usually went to my father’s parents' home in Oakland NJ, a couple of hours' drive from Neptune, along with my uncles Quentin and Sid (my father's brothers), their wives, and Quentin’s three children, who were about our age. Of course we had turkey, stuffing, and all the fixings. My mother made apple and mincemeat pies and to let the steam out, she took a sharp knife and made dotted lines in the crusts that read TA ['tis apple] and TM ['tis mince].
My response started out, “Christmas was the biggie.” The rest of this post is adapted from the essay I wrote for him then.
Our Christmas actually started with Thanksgiving - and anyone who denies that it began so early back in the "old days" or blames Hallmark for rushing the season is mistaken. We usually went to my father’s parents' home in Oakland NJ, a couple of hours' drive from Neptune, along with my uncles Quentin and Sid (my father's brothers), their wives, and Quentin’s three children, who were about our age. Of course we had turkey, stuffing, and all the fixings. My mother made apple and mincemeat pies and to let the steam out, she took a sharp knife and made dotted lines in the crusts that read TA ['tis apple] and TM ['tis mince].
Once we recovered from the soporific effects of the feast, my grandfather, a concert pianist whose skills had sadly grown rusty from arthritis and disuse, reluctantly succumbed to my grandmother's pleas and sat down at the piano, his ever-present cigar dangling from his lips, and we all sang Christmas carols. Then my sisters and I, having raided our grandmother’s wonderful costume trunk full of scarves and bolts of exotic material, belted out all five verses of "We Three Kings.” I always claimed the role of Balthazar because I loved the dark melodrama of his lines: "Myrrh is mine, its bitter perfume, breathes a life of gathering gloom; sorrowing, sighing, bleeding, dying, sealed in a stone-cold tomb." (Gian Carlo Menotti's opera Amahl and the Night Visitors, also about the gifts of the Magi, was written and first shown on TV in the early 1950's. My sisters and I took to it instantly, probably because we were already devoted fans of the three wise men and felt we had a special connection with them. We spent many happy hours reenacting the songs from Amahl - and thus a new holiday tradition was born.)
As soon as Thanksgiving was over, the Christmas season began in earnest. My mother made two fruitcakes, one dark and one light - the locus classicus for my own compulsion to bake fruitcake every year whether anyone likes it or not - which she doused liberally with brandy once a week until Christmas. Around the same time, my father scheduled the family Christmas card photoshoot, a ritual he truly adored. He set up lots of spotlights, and some years he also draped the room with sheets to provide a neutral backdrop. Elaborate scenarios were developed (clutching our pets; reading to the younger children; my sister at an easel pretending to paint), and a primitive version of Photoshop was applied to the results. His children didn’t always share his enthusiasm (as unfortunately can be seen from our glum expressions in some of the photos - re-do's weren't as easy as with an iPhone!). We had to sit very still, with our pasted-on smiles, and the spotlights made the room hot as an oven. Today, of course, I am inordinately grateful not only for the memories my father made for all of us by staging this event but also for the photographic record of how we all grew and changed and added to our number over the years. Wish I could tell him so now.
The cards began in 1943, when I was 10 months old. There was no card for 1944. After that the series remained unbroken; some years there were actually two different versions. The only year my parents appeared was 1950. Note the extra-special gift we received in 1953! Our last Christmas in Neptune was 1955; the cards continued for a few more years at our new home on Long Island.
A couple of weeks before The Day, we decorated the house. My mother had a creche that we set up on the mantle, and even though we weren't particularly religious, I loved the baby Jesus and the whole family tableau. (I still do.) Right below them hung the stockings awaiting Santa's attention - an interesting juxtaposition of Christian and pagan symbolism, though not one we thought much about at the time. We also had a little cardboard village with colored cellophane windows and holes for Christmas lights, which she arranged on the piano. A wreath went up on the door.
My father set up the tree in a semi-finished "game room" in the basement, near the pingpong table. The beloved box of ornaments came down from the attic, and we competed to be allowed to hang our favorites. Another predictable squabble was sparked by the silver foil icicles: I liked to hang them slowly and painstakingly so they would look like real icicles, while my sister preferred taking clumps of the stuff and flinging them at the tree. These mini-crises resolved, we artfully arranged our gifts under the tree - all but the ones from Santa, who didn't visit till Christmas Eve after all of us (including, we supposed, our parents) were sound asleep. (I'll never forget how proud I was when I was deemed old enough to be dropped off at Woolworth’s in Asbury Park to shop on my own, using the money I saved from my allowance by depositing fifty cents per week in a "Christmas Club.")
My parents always hosted an Open House for all the neighbors (children and adults alike) on Christmas Eve. During the preceding week, we made dozens and dozens of cookies - including sugar cookies, which we decorated with red and green sugar, and Tollhouse cookies, made by following the recipe on the back of the Nestle’s package, which magically and consistently produced the Best. Ever. Chocolate. Chip. Cookies. Out came the two fruitcakes, dark and light, for one last splash of brandy. Just before the party my mother prepared two batches of eggnog, nonalcoholic for the kids and most definitely alcoholic for the adults. We donned our Christmas finery and were allowed to stay up late. Years later, one of the neighborhood girls told me she was so inspired by these parties that as an adult she has always given a Christmas Eve Open House of her own.
After all the guests had gone home, we put on our foot pajamas and snuggled up to listen to "The night before Christmas"; then it was off to bed with us so we wouldn't be too tired the next morning. Not a problem for me; I was almost always the first one up. But we still had to wait for our parents to get up before we were allowed to go down to the basement and start opening our gifts - which seemed like forever but was probably more like half an hour. We had made our Christmas lists and I usually got exactly what I'd requested, plus lots of other stuff. One year I asked for a Nancy Lee doll but stipulated that I wanted her wrapped so I could be surprised when I opened the package. This turned out to be a bad call because she didn’t come in a box, and her gorgeous red hair ended up with a bad case of "wrapping paper head" that never quite went away no matter what I did.
When I was around five, my father bought us an electric train. After we went to bed on Christmas Eve, he stayed up long into the night laying the track so that the train would disappear down a hallway and a couple of minutes later reappear through the dining room. That year he, not I, was the first one out of bed on Christmas day. The train was a big hit with all of us but no one was more excited than my dad. If you want to make an engineer happy, just give him a model train and a whole day with nothing else to do but play with it.
No portrayal of Christmas in Shark River Hills, or any other holiday for that matter, would be complete without mentioning the firehouse on Brighton Avenue. The firehouse was more than just headquarters for the volunteer fire department, it was the beating heart of the community, serving as a meeting place for scout groups and other organizations and an event center for community parties and celebrations. My mother was a member of the Ladies’ Auxiliary, even though my father was not a firefighter. Here is a photo of the Christmas party in 1953, at which 73 children were in attendance, including both my sisters (#27 and #57), my BFF Joyce (#36), and practically everyone else I knew (plus a few I didn’t). Where was I? I guess I must have been ill that evening; surely I didn’t have anywhere else to go! (For awhile, identifying the 73 children became a Facebook obsession among the SRH crowd, including a circulating excel file that ended up with about 3/4 of the names filled in.)
By around Christmas there was usually plenty of snow on the ground, which meant the long, winding Riverside Drive hill would be cordoned off and sledding allowed. Wish I had a photo of that! Instead, I’m including a little home movie, taken by my dad, of my mom sledding down the driveway with me. Notice how my mother was dressed.
The end of the Christmas season was marked by an enormous bonfire at the edge of the Shark River, fueled by dozens of spent, dried-up Christmas trees. Both my sisters are in this photo, taken in 1951. (Where was I, I wonder?) On the right, in the background, you can see the mothers - again, barelegged, in skirts. Thanks to my sister Sherry for reminding me about this event.
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