The Christmas season never fails to bring with it a heightened sense of place, and places, long known and deeply loved. All my years of growing up were done in Fort Worth and on the TCU campus, and I knew the paths into and out of there like the blue veins that crisscross the back of my hands. A recent study of the mechanics of memory reveals that the images retained most sharply and lastingly are those in which the rememberer is emotionally involved “purely,” with the least amount of intrusive thought from “outside” the experience. Little wonder, then, that my childhood recollections are the brightest and longest, for the involvement was innocent and direct – simple, without the clatter that adult minds are heir to.
Part of the glue that held together my Christmas sense of place was the repetition that built into and onto tradition. There was a security in a sameness, a constancy, that linked one year to another, one holiday season to the next. Downtown, Leonard’s Dept. Store windows were winter wonderlands, with their mechanized displays of Mr. And Mrs. Claus, nodding dolls, tooting trains, and skaters in gay costumes going round and round on their ice mirrors. Salvation Army bell ringers with their black tri-podded pots were at every story entrance. Neighborhoods were kaleidoscopes of twinkling lights. But most of all, the heart of Christmas found its strongest beat in and around my real family and my extended TCU family.
Although we listened to Bing Crosby sing of white Christmases, in Fort Worth, Texas, we rarely had one, and those that came were more ice than snow. No matter the weather, though, each Christmas Eve Mother, Daddy, Grandma Georgie (my mother’s mother who lived with us), my sister Beth, and I loaded the laundry basket with our presents for my father’s assortment of aunts, uncles, and cousins, and headed east from our TCU hill home to the “Poly” section of Fort Worth to spend the evening around Grandmother Hewatt’s huge tree in the living room at 2900 Avenue B. We would sing Christmas carols and, of course, “Over the river and through the woods…” all the way down Forest Park Blvd. To Park Place to Eighth Avenue to Rosedale to Nashville Ave., thence to Avenue B. The way is fixed forever in my memory, and no matter how the street are changed and even renamed, that is the only correct way to that corner of Polytechnic Heights.
I loved going there, for the house was big – two-storied with front and back interior stairways with a common landing that led to the upstairs rooms stuck off here and there. There was, too, my Grandmother’s dressmaker shop out back, where she designed and made fine clothes for fine ladies. If we were lucky, we kids could go “out shop” and see the long table with its five sewing machines which worked off a central switch that, when “thrown,” would start the machines humming via a long belt that ran under the length of the table and turned mysterious wheels there. It was a real-life Willie Wonka factory, with the master switch and its conveyer belt, an old iron-cast wood-burning stove that almost bellowed its warmth, a mysterious button press, fine wools and brocades draped on dress forms, and closets full of costumes Grandmother had made and would rent for special occasions and holidays.
Often, however, we were forbidden entrance to this place of treasures, because Grandmother would be there, putting finishing touches on some handmade blouse or skirt to be hastily wrapped and placed under the tree that evening. She consistently “ran behind,” perhaps out of force of habit, having been widowed at twenty-five with five children under the age of seven, and being plunged into the immediacy of managing all needs for those five.
Inside the main house, the family assemblage spilled over into the dining room, kitchen, hall, and Grandmother’s bedroom right off the kitchen, for we were some thirty in number. The highlight of the evening was the exchange of presents, at least one for each adult, whose names had been drawn from a bowl at the same clan’s Thanksgiving gathering. The smallest children were commissioned to hand out the presents – some having to consult with a grown-up as to the name on the tag. Grandmother Hewatt’s gifts were never labeled, for whatever reason, and a guessing game ensued as to whom they should go, for in her haste she would have forgotten whose gift went in which box under which wrap.
Every year seemed the same and, indeed, we came to expect Grandmother to be running behind, certain cousins to be late, gifts to be unmarked, uncles and aunts to comment on our growth since the last time they had seen us, and the tree to be the “biggest and prettiest one yet!” Christmas at Grandmother Hewatt’s was something we could count on and feel secure in its sameness.
The house at 2900 Avenue B, now registered in Tarrant County Historic Resources Survey, was sold by my aunt several years ago, but I still drive by occasionally to … what? recapture the soul of a family that came together there so long ago and settled a lasting warm cover of love on my heart?
Another tradition that imprinted its ritual on the receptive cells of my memory was the annual delivery of gifts to my father’s and mother’s TCU colleagues. Mom was, I think, the original “do-it-yourselfer” and could and did make “from scratch” nearly everything we ate, wore, and lived among. Her hands fashioned clothes, curtains, and slip covers, while my Grandma Georgie’s expertise with appliqué, crochet, and needlepoint adorned our beds, tables, and walls. At Christmas, we had “lovin’ from the oven” that surpassed superlatives – cookies, candies, cakes, cream puffs, jams, hams, pies, and breads. Much of this bounty would be prepared as Christmas cheer for TCU friends, and Daddy and “the girls” – my sister and I – would make the rounds of those to whom the presents would go. It was a special treat for me to visit in the homes of these people who were then, and are still, important in the shaping of my outlook and attitude. Those Christmas homes occupy special rooms in my memory.
We usually started with the Scotts – Mary Beth and Gayle “Scotty” Scott and her father, then the president of TCU, Dr. E. M. Waits. Scotty was like a big jolly elf to me – a prominent geologist teacher/scholar with a great sense of humanness and joy of living. He was a perfect foil for the bright and witty Mary Beth, who kept all around her laughing at life and, more importantly, at themselves. The more sober “Prexy,” sat quietly, listening to the gay banter with a smile on his lips and a twinkle in his eye.
A totally different sort of atmosphere prevailed at the home of Daddy’s and Scotty’s mentor, Mr. Will Winton, and his gentle wife, Hortense. I can’t recall ever hearing Mr. Winton laugh or even seeing him smile, at Christmas or any other time, but he was kind, and Mrs. Winton was always a cheerful and gracious hostess, so that there was no dampening of our holiday spirit.
The Woodall Hogan household was yet another story. Head of the Chemistry Department and a Tennessee Southerner, Mr. Hogan lived with his two maiden sisters, Elizabeth and Ella D. They greeted us with loud, lively chatter that began as they opened the door, and didn’t end until you drove away, each talking louder and faster as the visit progressed. Their special Southern accents and manners were a fascination to me, and I have many times since set them, in my imagination, in a Tennessee Williams’ play of Southern eccentric gentility, although certainly without the decadence that emanated from that playwright’s pen.
And then there was our own home at 2627 Rogers Road on our TCU hill. Who among us having had a happy childhood does not have sweet recollections about a house we spent that happy childhood in? Ours was a frame house, built not long after the university moved from Waco to Fort Worth in 1910. It was located one-half block from the northern campus border and had been continuously inhabited by faculty until my parents sold the house and lot in 1965 to University Christian Church for their building expansion. The two windows that looked out on the porch that spanned the width of the house were in our living room, and in one of those large windows, at Christmas, our multi-colored tree lights shone each night of the holiday season.
Decorating the tree was a family production. Like most families, we had an assortment of old tried and true ornaments. Among them were a fragile glass Santa, a red-glass coiled horn, and glass birds that clipped onto the branches. These would be given the very best spots, while tinsel “icicles” were placed, not thrown (!), singly and carefully on each branch until the tree dripped with them and sparkled from top to bottom. When all was done, the lights were lit and we had only to admire our handiwork. Even the presents were placed just so around the tree’s base – rearranged each time a new present appeared, to preserve the esthetic balance.
The presents under that tree on Christmas morning are less memorable than the feelings that come back of being folded securely and unconditionally in the arms of a loving family. Most of our gifts were either handmade or second hand. I can remember especially a used bike, my first, that might as well have been made of gold (I was unaware that it wasn’t new until years later). And there was a handmade doll with red-yarn braids and handmade clothes, and an orange-crate doll house with papered walls and furniture made of wooden thread-spools. All of those wonderful things pale in the remembered glow of our family circle enjoying a special time in a special place.
In time, I tried to recapture the feelings I had known for my own children, summoning back some of the same settings and traditions. Whether I succeeded or not, I can’t be sure. That will have to be their story.
©1996 Joan Hewatt Swaim