by Mary Wakefield Buxton –
URBANNA — I grew up in a small town (Vermilion, Ohio) in a one car, one telephone (black), one TV and one bathroom home. My bedroom looked out on Lake Erie. It might just as well have been an ocean for there was no land in sight.
I knew from many trips to various northern ports on Father’s boat that a great country called Canada was on the other shore where the people talked “funny.” That funny talk I later learned was the English accent.
The lake in the summer was beautiful, mostly calm except for an occasional northwester when muddy white capped waves crashed on shore for three days. I have a painting in my office that Father did of the shimmering summer lake as the sun was setting in the west. I gaze on that painting every day and the memories of childhood return like pollen in the wind.
But in the winter, starting around Christmas, the lake turned into an Arctic landscape. Massive ice mountains would form creating intricate carved caverns along the shore. The ice would continue to build and by March it would extend maybe a quarter of a mile out in the lake turning my bedroom view to a desolate and frozen landscape. I remember wishing for the spring thaw when the first freighters, freed from their ice prisons, would make their way down the lakes to Cleveland from Duluth, through Superior, Huron, and Erie.
At Christmas we would buy a fresh tree, a Scotch pine was our favorite, and Father would trim the trunk and set it up in front of the picture window in the living room facing the lake.
Snow was already on the ground because I grew up in the 40s and that decade snow was copious and deep in northern Ohio. Many a time Father had to carry me in from the car left stranded at the highway down our driveway, over the bridge of the creek where Billy Bigaboo lived, past the peach orchard encased in snow, grape vines along the fence and dog kennel to our home. I was never sure what exactly was a bigaboo that Father spoke of each night in his bedtime story but in my imagination there was nothing in this world as loveable, adorable or as precious as a bigaboo.
My sisters and I would decorate the tree after Father positioned the colored lights. In Virginia the lights are mostly white but Yankee Christmas trees had colored lights. We followed with garlands, ornaments, icicles and finally fastened the angel at the top of the tree.
Stockings were hung on the fireplace mantel and on Christmas Eve Father would read from Charles Dickens “A Christmas Carol” where we shuddered at the terrible Scrooge and worried about lame Tiny Tim. I loved to say the expression “Bah, humbug!” which Scrooge uttered whenever he heard an idea he didn’t like.
Father would hang up his stocking too. Every year he tried to fool Santa by putting one of his nestled amongst his three daughters’ stockings, but every year Santa seemed to know he was an imposter hoping for illegally purloined candy. Every Christmas morning when Father looked in his sock he found the same disappointing fillers…a lump of coal, a spoon, and a large brown, inedible nut wedged in the toe.
Sorry for Father, we always shared our candy with him, but one Christmas morning Alice and I rose early and removed the usual fare from Father’s sock and filled it with our candy. Father was surprised.
My problem was I hated surprises and because of that waiting for Christmas morning to open presents was always a hardship for me. It seemed to me one should open presents whenever one received them and not put them under the tree and wait weeks before enjoying them, which Mother insisted we do.
She even insisted we sit down and eat a full breakfast on Christmas morning before opening presents, which seemed inordinately silly if not cruel. Only then could we tear into our gifts. Bah, humbug! Odd how I continued the tradition with my children and insisted on a good breakfast before opening presents.
One Christmas when I was about 8 or 9, I decided I had had enough torture. On Christmas Eve when my parents left the house to visit a neighbor, I sat down in front of the tree and diabolically opened all my presents to see what they were and whether I liked them or not. I liked them. Then I rewrapped each one carefully so Mother would never know what I had done. How happy I was with my wicked ways!
But on Christmas morning I awoke with a sick feeling. I had to pretend to be thrilled opening my presents in front of my parents in order to complete my treachery. It was the worst Christmas morning I ever experienced.
After New Year’s we would take down the tree and put the ornaments away. Father would don his rugged hunting clothes and I would put on my woolen coat and required leggings (Bah, humbug!) and we would drag the tree out on the ice as far as we could walk.
Sometimes so far out I could barely see the tree from my bedroom window, and Father would plant the tree in the ice. There it would stand like a soldier on watch all through the winter nights until the spring thaw when one morning we would look out and find the tree was gone in the night. We knew the freighters freed from their icy prisons, would steam down lakes again from Duluth to Superior, Huron and Erie to Cleveland and the lakes would soon be calm and shimmering in the sunshine once again.
It all comes back to me, the love and adoration of Christmases past and especially that young family in Ohio captured once again as we once were for a few moments in a time long gone.
Merry Christmas to one and all and may all your days be merry and bright.
© 2022.
(Welcome to “One Woman’s Opinion,” a long-term feature of the Southside Sentinel, written by Urbanna resident Mary Wakefield Buxton. Traditionally a humorist, Mary has written a column on all subjects and sometimes in very serious vein. Along with writing a column for the Sentinel since 1984, she is also author of 15 books about life and love in Tidewater, Virginia.)
