How like at a puzzle I work at my Christmas memories, spreading all the pieces out, turning each over and around, testing this one here, that one there, joining the scattered snatches of images until a sure form appears. The frame is easy to assemble, all pieces having common straight sides that lock together. These are much like the pieces of most Christmas memories, having to do with candlelight and carols, mythical gift bringers and family gatherings, lighted trees, tinsel, and all-round peace and good will.
Coming together to form the central picture within my Christmas frame are the unique images of one’s Christmases–those images that make each celebration a private one. There I can reassemble our family’s annual tree selection and decorating ceremony, every old and familiar ornament taken out of their tissue wraps, in turn, and placed just so on just the right branch. There, too, is the patient direction of my mother as my sister and I constructed the hand-made items we would give to aunts and cousins and grandmothers; and there, too, I can see again the serious business of cutting rolled dough into shapes of storybook characters, star, wreath, and tree, cooking them to plumpness and icing them to life with colored coatings enhanced with sparkling sugars and candied morsels, then nibbling away the various parts of the gingerbread man until only the smiling face would be left to pop in the mouth last.
Taking shape out of patches of shade and color are vignettes of the TCU family at Christmas in an age when there was more time to come together and share in observance of the season. For it has only been in the last fifteen years or so that the mid-semester break includes Christmas and New Year. In my day, the Fall term allowed only a short time-out for about a week and resumed a few days after the first of the year. The campus, then, instead of being the relatively quiet place it is now in the days immediately preceding the Christmas week, was alive with holiday spirit. Christmas pageants, programs, and parties filled the December calendar and culminated in a banquet for the students and another for the faculty.
The Faculty Christmas Dinner was held annually from as far back as I can remember to the last one in 1984. For several years in the late thirties and early forties, the party was held in the basement cafeteria of the Administration Building (now Reed Hall), with the President, E. M. “Prexy” Waits, as Master of Ceremonies. The cafeteria was not a very attractive room, at best, but through the efforts of the University’s dietitian, my Grandma Georgie, it became, for this occasion, a festive banquet hall. My mother assures me that I was never actually there during the dinner, but I have a pretty fair reckoning of what they were like because of the previews I was privy to. Before the dinners, I could see the cafeteria in its decorated splendor, the exposed pipes along the ceiling, the stark pillars, and bare walls disappearing behind garlands of ivy and holly, ribbons, glitter, and lights.
If the actual affair was anything like the preparations for it, there was great fun, indeed, at those early Christmas parties. As a part of the program, each faculty member present would receive a gift. A group of faculty wives, headed usually by my mother and Betty Ridings, wife of the esteemed journalism professor, and the President’s daughter, Mary Beth Waits Scott, would haunt the dime stores well in advance of the party, to make the gift selection that, when presented, was bound to bring hearty laughter from the crowd. Hours were spent in composing the most appropriate verse to go along with the gag gift, and which was to be read aloud by the recipient. I can remember the outburst of laughter during composition sessions in my home.
To present the gifts, of course, a Santa Claus was needed. Just exactly how Daddy came to be the impostor is a piece of the puzzle that is missing, but play the role he did for a number of years. It was a source of great merriment for my sister and me to perform the yearly ritual of helping him fit into his red and white Santa Claus costume. Daddy was always of trim build, so that padding was needed to make a convincing round belly. Beth and I would hold pillows in place while Mother positioned the pants and jacket around them, securing all with a wide black belt. Then we would fix big white whiskers over his ears and under his chin and top it all off with the traditional floppy cap. The transformation was complete with Miss Sadie Beckham’s cowbell and, in repeated rehearsals, he would ring the bell to get our attention, hold his pillowed belly with his broad hand, and give out with the “ho, ho, ho” s. He didn’t need to practice getting a twinkle in his eye; he seemed to have been born with that.
Daddy apparently took his role as the evening’s entertainment seriously, and began to stage his entrances, arriving once by donkey and another time by motorcycle. Stories tell that it was no small trick to coax the donkey down the steps from the first floor entrance landing to the hall in front of the cafeteria door. The only alternate route to enter was through the kitchen, and that, said my grandmother, was out of the question.
As the years went by, and the student body and faculty grew, it became impossible to manage a student banquet, and the informal frivolity of the faculty inevitably gave way to a more formal format with programs of more accomplished performance than professors masquerading as jolly old elves.
There is a line from Longfellow– “…let the dead past bury its dead“–which, no doubt, is wise and right. But sometimes, when my mother and I reminisce over an earlier day, and I see her pretty half-smile, and hear the distance in her voice as she remembers, saying, “We had fun. . . . we really did,” I can’t help but wish that for a small piece of time–for just a small piece–we might enter that scene again.
But for now, having finished my puzzle and once more admired its view, I will crumble the pieces apart and let them fall back into their box, to be taken out another time and carefully, lovingly, and joyfully placed together again.
©1987 Joan Hewatt Swaim