Santa visits, we open gifts and share a cookie platter

By Barbara Gillingham, Special to the Town Crier

Christmas was the special event when I was growing up in Los Altos in the early 1950s. Our family gathering included grandparents, aunts, uncles and young cousins. There was always a fire in the main living room of our home to greet the guests on Christmas Eve.

My mother and aunt shopped, made the Christmas cookies and decorated the house weeks in advance. We children waited for the big moment - Santa’s arrival at our ranchita on Grant Road. We assumed he went to everyone’s home, not just ours. We were just lucky to see him in person and not to have to wait for Christmas morning.

We brought home the tree early. It was always a major ritual to pick it out. It was always a spruce, and it had to be just right. Its narrow boughs spread wide and tall until it seemed to fill half the room, with the star scraping the ceiling in front of the living room bay.

My aunt supervised the tinsel. You had to reach a certain age to qualify to hang tinsel. We were restricted to the lower branches, but we tried, when no one was looking, to toss it up high (as we couldn’t reach) where it would lodge itself in a disheveled pile. We ran from the room but knew that, when discovered, we would be fired. Each piece had to be carefully tied to the ends of the boughs. It was a labor intensive effort that brought the reward of green draped in streams of liquid silver.

Everyone had favorite ornaments: worn-out cloth Santas, hand-painted glass birds with sharp, white-whiskered tales, and glass-blown globes. The tree was strung with colorful bubble candle lights in bright reds, greens and blues and giant outdoor colored bulbs. There was not one twinkle of white or any hint of a theme tree, so popular today.

The Lionel toy train ran under the tree among glitter-sprinkled cardboard houses, each with a single bulb lighting its interior, shining out over a blanket of cotton snow. The Lionel puffed smoke, a feature my cousin loved, and made that familiar rickety-tickity sound. The smell of the old transformer blended with that of the newly cut pine. The train went round and round, each time passing the tin gatehouse where a little man, waving a red lantern, came out the door to wave the train on. We spent hours playing there, running the train and arranging the nearby manger scene.

We always celebrated Christmas Eve with a special dinner beginning with sweet Swedish herring on dark bread, then a festive meal ending with a Swedish cookie platter later in the evening.

We waited politely but impatiently for my father to give the usual instructions, “OK, kids, better go and look for Santa!” Santa always came through the front door. We six small children peered out the front window, our noses reddening as we pressed against the cold glass, scanning the dark apricot orchard for our first glimpse of jolly ole Nick.

I found out later that it wasn’t always so jolly behind the scenes. My grandfather reluctantly played the part, grunting and struggling to don the traditional Santa suit which, by that time, was probably at least a size too small. It was an antique, originally worn by my grandfather when he played Santa in the Ice Palace, a building built of ice blocks, in downtown St. Paul for the festive winter carnival of 1936. It was made of thick red wool, not very comfortable for California or the heat of a fireplace’s glow.

What excitement on seeing Santa burst through the door with his sack of toys! Blinded by his disguise, Santa usually fumbled through the door and groped his way toward the tree bellowing, “Ho! Ho! Ho!” He moved quickly through the joyful crowd stopping to shake hands or chase a small child behind a mother’s skirts, but always finding time to joke and sit on my grandmother’s lap. Then off he went, and we exchanged gifts.

Gift exchanging was not extravagant. My mother always said that a child usually only wants one thing and that one gift will be “the happy gift” that will make Christmas joyful all by itself. My parents always seemed to find the right one. One Christmas, I received a favorite doll, and my cousin got GI Joe, a windup soldier in a Jeep which bucked and turned as it sped through the room. I see our toys now and again in antique shops. There were no toys here left in their original boxes to be marveled at on “Antiques Roadshow!” We would grab a cookie or two or four and charge off to play, guarding another memory of Christmas past.