I’ve been thinking lately about our Christmases during the war years of the 1940s. My memory of Christmas observances only kicked in for 1943 and 1944. I have almost no memory of what I received for Christmas in those years, but I do remember some things about getting ready for Christmas. Possibly one of the reasons I don’t remember much about the gifts is that there were not many to remember. Nobody we knew in those years had much money, and everything was scarce.

I really don’t remember feeling deprived at Christmas time. It may be that while we didn’t have much, we hadn’t had the experience of having a lot, so we didn’t realize we were missing it. We did have a Christmas tree, a few gifts and food in the house;

and that seemed good. I remember more about getting ready for Christmasthan I do of the day itself, especially bringing in the Christmas tree.

We never had a boughten Christmas tree at home when I was growing up.

We always went out to the woods or hillsides or fence rows and cut a tree from the farm. There were always cedar trees on our farm, so we had no lack of Christmas tree choices.

But there were no spruces or pines; it was always a cedar tree for Christmas.

We usually waited until a few days before Christmas to bring in the tree. Beginning Christmas in mid-November, as the stores do today, would have seemed strange back in 1943. Also, back then Santa Claus pretty much kept himselfhidden at the North Pole.

We didn’t see him at the stores or on the sidewalks, although he did show up at the Christmas program at church to hand out brown paper bags of hard candy for us kids. There wouldusually be an orange or a tangerine in the bag with the candy. Those candy and fruit treats, especially the oranges and tangerines, were rare and special treats in 1944.

On the morning that Dad first took us boys to bring in the Christmas tree, he already had the horses in harness and hitched to the wagon, and had been doing the farm chores. He came into the house and had Ben and me to get our coats and hats and gloves on, so we could go with him to get us a Christmas tree. Our wagon at that time was one of the old wooden-wheeled wagons with the high steelrimmed wheels and a long wooden tongue between the horses. Although I wasonly 4 years old, Dad would sometimes let me hold the reins and at least play like I was driving the horses.

Actually the horses knew pretty well how to go without my driving, but at least I was getting that feeling of being almost big enough to drive the horses. Dad took the reins again as we were going through a gate or making our way across the dry creek on the back side of the farm.

We helped Dad pick out a good tree, and he cut it down with a few swings of the double-bladed chopping axe, as we called it;

then he lifted it onto the wagon with us for the trip to the house. Cedar trees have a natural unique scent, and I came to associatethe smell of the cedar tree with Christmastime. We made it back to the house, and Ben and I had to go get Mom to show her the prize tree we had cut for her.

She was pleased with it, so we thought we had done agood job.

Dad brought the handsaw to saw off the tree to the right height and to square off the end. Then he made a sort of a tree stand by crossing two oneby-four boards and driving a large nail through the center of the boards and into the bottom of the tree. With that, it stood on its own, but we also used small wires tied to the upper part of the tree and fastened at the other end to the window frame to stabilize the tree. Our tree sure made the house smell good.

All of us got in on decorating the tree. Even though there were no electric lights back then, we still decorated it with a lot of color and it looked good.

Mom made several pans of popcorn, and we used sewing thread and large needles to put the thread through the popcorn puffs, making white strands to go around the tree at different heights. We also made garland chains by cutting colored paper, gluing the strips into interlocking loops to form the chain. We had a little bit of colored construction paper, but I especially remember cutting strips from the Sunday comic pages to make the loops. The funny paper, as we called it, was the only colored part of the newspaper in those days.

For the very top of the tree, we cut a five-pointed star from a cereal box and wrapped it in gold paper.

That represented the star of Bethlehem, pointing the wise men to Jesus. The gold star at the top of the tree became a tradition for us.

◊◊◊

Editor’s note: Jerry Nichols, a native of Pea Ridge, is a retired Methodist minister with a passion for history.

He is vice president of the Pea Ridge Historical Society. He can be contacted by e-mail at [email protected], or call 621-1621.

Community, Pages 5 on 12/22/2010