Mother accused Aunt Mimi’s Christmas tree of harboring cockroaches. At least, I think that’s how the fight started. Mother favored long-needled evergreens decorated with multicolored balls and tinsel painstakingly draped over the branches. Aunt Mimi yanked out of her attic each season a medium-sized deciduous corpse wrapped in white cotton. She’d hang Christmas balls on it and Uncle Mearl would put together the train set underneath the tree.
I don’t know if Aunt Mimi’s cotton-wrapped wonder provided apartments for bugs, but it was looking a little tired.
The season to be jolly catapulted the Buckingham girls into a frenzy of competitive decorating; on top of that, Aunt Mimi had to go to mass every single morning, and sometimes she’d hit vespers too. She must have been exhausted. Every present had to be hand-wrapped, made individual in some way. If you let the store wrap the present, it meant you didn’t truly love the recipient.
Then there was the holiday cooking, because everyone kept open house the week of Christmas, plus there were parties to attend every night.
Rich, poor or in the middle, everyone decorated for the holiday. A friend of Uncle Mearl’s even put a sleigh with Santa and reindeer on his roof. People sang in the streets, carols blared over loudspeakers and we gathered around pianos, fiddles and even harmonicas to sing together.
We Buckinghams sang more than others, or at least I think we did. Half the girls in my class took piano lessons. I vowed never to do it. I’d play the tuba before I’d itch on a piano bench, crinolines torturing me, while I pounded out “Jingle Bells.”
We didn’t have money for music lessons, but Mother, ruthlessly determined that I should master the social graces, was an excellent seamstress and she’d been putting money aside.
I promised to start music lessons after Christmas. But we each had to make a contribution to the group. If you didn’t play the piano or cook a ham, you had to make something. I wrote a poem, coolly received by Mother, who said I’d cheated because words came easily to me. I should sweat over a group present. Still, she let the poem pass. It was about horses talking at midnight on Christmas Eve.
Aunt Mimi thought I should have written about Jesus. I learned early that everyone is a critic.
Anyway, Mother and Aunt Mimi started hollering at each other in Aunt Mimi’s heavily decorated living room—elves peeped out from picture frames, for starters, and even the naked-lady ashtrays, which Uncle Mearl adored, wore Christmas garb. (Aunt Mimi insisted the ashtrays were artistic.) These freestanding Nubian princesses now had wreaths around their necks, their nipples freshened with red nail polish.
Both sisters were probably worn out getting ready for nonstop festivities. However, once a fight was engaged, it had to be seen through to the bitter end.
Mother stomped out. I followed. Everyone else had the presence of mind to disappear. Once they raised their voices a small fit of destruction usually followed. You didn’t want to be in the line of fire.
By the time we reached home, instead of being cooled off—and it was a cold walk—Mother was volcanic. She yanked Sis’s presents out of the closet and said we were going down to the square to return them.
I was happy to be home with Mickey. Why go back out into the wind?
“Mom, why does Aunt Mimi have a cotton tree?”
“Because she’s too damn cheap to buy a tree each year.”
“I thought Aunt Mimi had money.”
“She has more than we do, kid. Tighter than the bark on a tree.”
In truth, Aunt Mimi’s resources were modest, but she was a good manager of money, whereas Mother was not. This, too, was often noted by big sister to little sister with predictable results. As luck would have it, Dad, softhearted, would give money to anyone telling him a sob story. He didn’t help matters.
“And how come Aunt Mimi uses only one color ball on the tree?”
Sometimes she varied the colors. This was a red year.
“She thinks she’s fashionable. I know more about color than she does. She used to go to Philadelphia and New York when she was a buyer for Bon-Ton department store, so she thinks she knows everything.”
The wind rattled the shutters. Mother decided she’d go downtown the next day. I asked Mother whether Big Mimi and Virginia would know it if I bought them Christmas presents. Could they look down from heaven and see?
Mother didn’t answer. She picked up the phone and called Aunt Mimi. The next thing I knew she was bawling on the phone, and I guess Aunt Mimi was too.
Eugene was in Japan now. Even though Japan had lost World War II and now played permanent host to their American guests, Mother was nervous for him. If they’d bombed Pearl Harbor, who knew what they might do in the future? She cried about Gene’s being away.
By the time the tears dried, the girls had made up.
Good thing, because the big Christmas dinner was the next night. The sisters alternated years. It was Aunt Mimi’s year. She’d pushed together every table in the house, plus card tables, so that they were in one line extending from the end of the kitchen through the formal dining room and into the living room.
As I could now eat with the adults, I was very excited to show off. Mother worried (and Aunt Mimi worried even more) that I would never become a proper lady. I intended to be the best dinner companion who’d ever existed, and I had read etiquette books at the library. I was armed for any conversational possibility including flower arranging, about which I knew little, but Mother said it was important.
The evening of the dinner, crystal clear and icy cold, presaged a good party. People stamped their feet before walking through Aunt Mimi’s wide front door. Dad made orange blossoms, his specialty. Uncle Mearl and Russell, Julia Ellen’s steady, stood behind the bar mixing drinks. We kids scrambled, chased one another and played with Butch, who was in a frenzy of excitement. We played with the toy train.
The seating arrangements puffed me up because I was not seated between Mom and Dad. I sat between Russell and Ken senior. Directly across from me was Grandma Spellman, who was so old they shouldn’t have been serving her turkey—they should have been giving her extreme unction.
Grandma Spellman was Gertrude Buckingham’s mother. Bucky, Mom’s younger brother, had married a cultured woman, to the shock of the family. He was rough and ready. Gertrude appreciated the arts, the finer things in life. They were proof that opposites attract, because it was a good marriage.
Grandma Spellman suffered from Parkinson’s disease. Her head wiggled and her voice did too. As this was my first meeting with the lady, I had no idea she was afflicted. I thought she was playing with me, so I, remembering my etiquette books, tried to be the most pleasing dinner companion in the world. I began wiggling my head and my voice, too.
Russell couldn’t help himself. He giggled. Ken senior, red in the face, looked the other way or he would have laughed, too. My mother finally caught sight of me, jumped out of her chair and literally lifted me up from mine. She smacked my bottom down the hall all the way back to the kitchen.
Not only had I disgraced myself by offending Grandma Spellman, I had disgraced her and Dad. I could march myself up to Aunt Mimi’s bedroom and miss the party. No food, either.
Grandma Spellman had a good sense of humor. She thought it was funny and she knew I wasn’t mocking her. She troubled herself to get up from the table and plead my case to Mom.
Finally I was permitted back in the dining room. Russell couldn’t speak to me, though, because he’d burst out laughing and then Aunt Mimi would be cross at him.
After dinner we sang, I read my poem and Dad and Mom sang “O Holy Night” together. His voice, deep as an operatic bass, and her voice, a mezzo, sounded glorious together. Everyone sang some more and we remembered by name and song those that were dead. Then the children were dismissed to play.
I wanted to make up for my mistake, so I washed dishes in the kitchen with Julia Ellen. She was a cheerful worker and we sang together too. Back then people sang a lot; you sang in the fields, you sang in the evening, you sang at church. It made the work go faster. People don’t sing like that today.
The men tossed on coats and stood out on the porch smoking their cigars, pipes and cigarettes. The house, overflowing, would have turned into a smokebomb if the men hadn’t gone outside. Mother merrily trotted around, Chesterfield to her lips. She wasn’t exposing herself to the cold.
I skipped out, taking a break from the dishes. I saw that Uncle Kenny’s eyes were wet. Dad and Uncle Mearl stood next to him. Dad’s arm thrown around Ken’s shoulders.
I snuck quietly back into the kitchen. Whatever love was, it was more than I could understand.