WAR CHRISTMAS 1943 [1-8-09 – 5-9-10]

Judith Wood Spock

Our family of five had just moved, after three years of living in steaming Texas (before air conditioning), to a noble house in suburban Rye, New York. After a brief and startling Fall, with leaves, first aflame, then down and scattered, the cold weather stunned us. We realized we had been thrown onto an ice flow when our cotton clothes, even with some few added wool things, didn’t rescue us from freezing over like our car had, when I’d tried to wash the frost off of it and had turned it into an iceberg, layered with water from the hose that finally leaked to a standstill in a bitter wind.

World War Two was on full force and furnaces limped along on coal that was in short supply and hard to find. Coal was supplemented by oil, even harder to find. The living-room thermostat was set at 62 degrees. Every other room was colder. We knew our brother would be drafted into the war when he turned eighteen, only months away. The war seemed to be making our very blood run cold.

My father, who grew up on a rocky farm in Connecticut, scolded my mother, “I told you about the weather, Grace, and you just refused to believe me….” What transplants, from warmer climes could possibly believe the awful truth about this kind of weather? We had to wonder.

Christmas, looming ahead, looked hopeless, a mockery of our sunny days in Berkeley and Mill Valley, California, and our hot days in Texas.

My father was anxious about an immense new responsibility that was distorted by the war. My mother, was determined, at age forty three, to commute to Columbia Teachers College in New York City, to take graduate courses in ‘educational psychology’, an unheard of discipline, and an unthinkable choice, at her advanced age (as we kids saw it). My father took the same train at other times, to oversee the Federal Social Security Program in a region of nine states that stretched from Maine to Pennsylvania, and also to commute to his office in Manhattan. His boss was ‘Washington’ and his worries were many.

I was a brown haired girl, both pudgy and lanky at eleven, and changing, first one way and then the other, day by day. I was in a strange new elementary school unlike any I’d ever gone to, and there had been half a dozen schools in my short life of moving and traveling.

My blue eyed sister, Janet, braces just off her teeth, was fourteen and newly lovely, but shy at her new high school. She quickly put her finger on a major problem. We had no clothes! We needed soft wool sweaters and wool socks and wool skirts and coats and mittens and wool hats. My father added that we needed long wool underwear and stockings and leggings and boots. “Don’t you understand? Grace? It hasn’t even snowed yet!”

Our brother at seventeen was now tall and blond, and though he’d helped drive us north from Texas, he’d had to help get our frozen, only car ‘up on blocks’ in our new garage ‘for the duration’ of the war. With an ‘A’ sticker on our car windshield and no mitigating circumstances (like being old or being a doctor or being moved by the government the way we had just been) gas was almost non-existent for most civilians. So, even without our older family car, the faded aquamarine Pierce Arrow touring car, that had been all ‘his’ in Texas, my brother was getting into the swing of his new high school and filling his two rooms (and bath) on our top floor with his collections of electrical materials, his Hallicrafter short wave radio and his stacks of radio diagram magazines.

My brother, Woody, was a charming genius, guilty of being a dyslexic technologist, absorbed in sound systems, radios and classical radio station WQXR. He was up for one more crack at high school hoping to graduate before being called into the ‘awful sausage-maker of war”, as my father called it.

My father, wounded in World War I, was a young officer of 22, leading a platoon of 30 men, when he got a battlefield promotion, a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star for heroic action under fire, at Ypres and Cantigny…. and now? He wept openly for my startled brother. And now, all of us were afraid for him.

My mother was determined not to sink, to push us all along, cheering us up, eager, impatient, she set off on a course toward self sufficiency, necessary if my father failed to pull out of his state of anxious grief. She fought the winter. She fought my father’s dark view of reality, fueled by radio news. She fought for her cubs by leaving us in the den while she foraged to find a way to strongly live with all the adversity, to save her own sensible confidence. She went on to learn more, to qualify, and was home when she could be.

We felt abandoned with our worried Dad and missed our resourceful Mom. We understood nothing. We dropped the habit of talking with each other and tried to confront the cold changes, each in our own way.

All of our plans went awry. Shortages of everything. Eggs, butter, meat, vegetables. Sugar, gas, firewood. Ice skates and bicycles. Clothes! Wool! Leather! Paper! Only dedicated shoppers could beat back the deprivation in those War days. Women, long established in Rye, who knew butchers and tradesmen from years of ‘custom’ with them, might ‘hear’ of a shipment of beef, butter or sugar, but my mother was not a shopper and wasn’t known to grocers or even cobblers or the good women who ran the Thrift Shoppe of gently used clothing and goods that were being altered, repaired and resold, or passed on to other family members in those days of short supply.

My mother vowed to never bribe a butcher or the coal deliveryman. What wasn’t rationed was expensive. We were hunting through hand-me-downs when we finally found ice skates and light corduroy snow pants for me. I quickly outgrew them and I wore them anyway. Cold ankles and cramped toes. We never found a bike for me. New or old.

Our Airedale dog, the iconic family breed, developed encephalitis and trembled and spasmed continually. My father determined to pull him through. After walking up the hill from the commuter train every evening, he made great stews of cereals for Rags laced with horsemeat and kind coaxing. The horsemeat he cooked for Rags was the only meat we saw from week to week. I became pale and anemic. The doctor prescribed a tonic of vitamin B that was missing in our meatless meals of potatoes, cabbage and root vegetables. Canned peas and peaches were hard to find. We bought the last can of tomatoes from a grocer’s shelf and were not to find another one until well after the war, two years later.

With our parents as examples of determination in the face of difficult odds, my sister and I, huddled around the kitchen stove one day, decided that we would make Christmas this year! Somehow, we would warm up our cold family!

First? The tree! We would get one and hang our beloved ornaments on it, string popcorn and cranberries. Tinsel. Set out the crèche. Maybe our brother would help us gather fallen branches in the woods nearby to have a fire in the fireplace. Mother would play the cold piano. Our father would warm up the strings of his violin. My brother, happy to play the clarinet by ear in the school orchestra, would join in, or join us caroling, singing bass while Jan and I would sing alto and soprano. We loved the planning of it. The rest of them had lost their hope for Christmas. What they wanted, or needed, would never be the gift for them this year. It seemed to us, they felt Christmas could only fail them, be so much less. But we would change their minds!

Then we learned that Christmas trees were in very short supply. No one could tell us where to find one. They were going to those long established customers, not to newcomers like us. We both cried. Even my sister, so grown up now, cried when I did. Soon she had another plan. To find a young tree in woods nearby, to cut it down and bring it in the way they do on Christmas cards. We couldn’t find one in the icy snow. Then we found one, but it was ugly. We found a pretty nice one, but we couldn’t cut it down. Our outdoor tools were still in storage. Our brother leaned on the tree with us. It bent to the ground, but sprang back up.

So we used the old turkey carving knife to cut tufts of pine and fir and brought them into the house. The fragrance made our eyes water. We arranged them on the mantel around the brass candleholders, passed down from my mother’s grandmother, shaped like beehives, brass like sun through honey, but they didn’t lift the chill of the dark house.

Later, my sister said, “Give me a hand.” I was reading. I read every waking minute. Not for school. Just to keep the gloom at a distance, so I could overlook my muttering father, my mother’s distraction. We had all, somehow failed to make each other happy. “Come on,” Jan whispered. Down to the basement where huge cardboard boxes were stacked against the wall. One was broken and would never box a fridge or stove again. “That’s it”, my sister sang. The four sides came apart, and she, never the artist, drew a traditional tree, four feet high from trunk to crown. With the carving knife she sawed out the shape, traced around it, and made a second matching shape. Then she sawed the twin free from the cardboard and there the two identical trees stood. Side by side. “Well, now what?” I wanted to know. She hacked out a slot in the slightly more stately tree and slid the other one down it, into place, creating a four sided brown cardboard ‘tree’ with 12 rough, sticking out ‘branches’, that was standing on its slotted four sided ‘trunk’. I thought it looked pretty dumb. I didn’t say so, not this late in the game!

“Now we have to paint it! Get your green poster paint!” Jan said.

“There’s not enough,” I mourned.

“We’ll add water.” Jan insisted. “We can add your blue paint and put it on streaky like a tree. It’s supposed to be a little scratchy looking.” We scrubbed the colors on with a water color brush and an old pastry brush. Slowly the colors dried.

Now it was kind of a tree! In the living room we put a white sheet on mother’s grandmother’s table and planted the tree in the snow of the sheet. It pushed the tree together snugly. The ornaments, the tinsel, the angel finial, the crèche to rest nearby, bit by bit we bejeweled the tree with every ‘happy family’ memory. “One more thing”, Jan called out as she rummaged in boxes and drawers, “We have to string popcorn to lace from limb to limb, but we can’t buy any, I know.” Then she opened the drawer of the old table to reveal a can of pop corn. “Surprise! From last year!” she laughed. “I found it when we moved in!” The smell of popping corn filled the house and lasted until we sewed every last kernel into a long chain to drape over the indulged tree, loaded now, with old family ornaments and the ones we bought in 1940, before the war began, all bright with color and reflected light.

When our parents came back from seeing the doctor, they gasped at my brother’s crackling fire, amazed. The greens on the mantel! Tearful and happy for us, they both began to laugh and ask, “A tree! A tree? Where did you ever get a Christmas tree?” (And then we knew it really did look like a really great little tree!)

“Well,” my sister said, “We just found it. We did! Right here in this house!” We laughed, “It was all right here in this house!”

It was the beginning of things getting better. The beginning of our warming up again. Our getting on with it.