Perry and Me Home for the Holidays
My father liked music and he like Christmas but he didn't like Christmas music. Consequently, there wasn't a lot of Holiday music in the house. Of course there was music on the radio and we did have some played around the house especially the week leading up to Christmas. But for a house of music lovers the Holiday music selection was limited. As I recall most of the Christmas music that was played at the house was by my mother and, once I became old enough, me. I mostly remember my mom's album of a choir singing mostly traditional Christmas Hymns. There was also the Nutcracker Suite and, as my sister Babs reminded me, the “Music Box” album of Christmas songs. I don't remember many pop holiday songs being played. I remember the “Sleigh Ride” song by the Boston Pops with Arthur Fiedler so perhaps we had that 1959 album but I only remember the song, not the album. I'm pretty sure there were about 3 holiday albums in the house. From the radio and piped-in playing in the stores we did get a steady diet of Bing singing “White Christmas”, Nat singing “The Christmas Song”, along with the other classics. I don't remember hearing Christmas music at either of my grandparent's homes either, although I do remember my mom's mom signing “Christmas is coming and the goose is getting fat”. It's a song you don't hear much these days and as a little kid I couldn't figure out how you could give someone a half penny. At home the music around the house was mostly the same as the rest of the year with a little bit of holiday music now and then.
When I was maybe 11 I bought my first Christmas music album. It was a Perry Como Christmas album. I most likely bought it in 1960 but the album was originally released somewhere in the 50's. I played that album every year at Christmas time until I left home for college. That album is the soundtrack for my Christmases with my family back in New York. Consequently I have a soft spot for the songs on that album and even today I continue to listen to them when the Holiday season comes rolling along. The songs from that album feel like Christmas to me as they bring back memories of my Christmases past. Babs and I did eventually buy some popular Christmas music when we got older, like The Beach Boys' Christmas album (Babs) and the Motown Christmas album (me), but we were teenagers by then.
My mom would put out our Holiday decorations around the house sometime in December and my dad usually hung lights on the outside of the house around our dinning room window. I say usually because there were a few years where he didn't. One year my dad was very busy with work and he was working a lot of overtime. Consequently he did not make time to put them up. My sister Babs was now old enough to both care and voice her opinion about those things. She kept bugging my dad about it. In my family we are all very good about being relentless for something we want with my sister being #1 at it. My Dad finally got so tired of her pestering him about it that he finally went out and put them up on Christmas Day after we opened all our presents.
When Babs and I were young we would buy Christmas gifts for our parents at the church holiday bazaar. It was a kind of indoor garage sale, lots of stuff other people didn't want for a very cheap price. One year I found four little ceramic angels each holding a letter that together spelled out “NOEL”. The next year when my mom put them out my father rearranged the letters so they spelled LEON and that started a sort of family tradition of rearranging the NOEL angels to spell a variety of things. Those angels spent very little time in the “NOEL” arrangement. In fact, my father would refer to them as the Leon angels. I don't know if my Mom still has them but I suspect those angels are one of the most remembered Christmas decorations by us three kids.
Christmas didn't truly start at our house until my dad got home from the office on Christmas Eve. He only had a half day of work on Christmas Eve and when he got home that's when we put up the Christmas tree. On Christmas Eve afternoon we would gather, just my mom and dad and us kids. We would put the tree up and decorate it together. This took most the afternoon and by the time we finished it would be close to dinner time. We'd all eat dinner together and after dinner we sat around the tree talking and anticipating the next day and we'd even sometimes have some Christmas music playing. Then my parents would read us “The Night Before Christmas” followed by the Christmas story from the Bible, or maybe it was the other way around. After that we'd hang our stockings, being the oldest mine was always the biggest! Then it was off to bed tossing and turning with anticipation until we finally fell asleep. Christmas morning we rushed down stairs and opened all the presents, pretty much as fast as we could. With my dad being an only child and my Mom having just an unmarried sister Christmas dinner was always at our house and the family would show up that afternoon. We did Christmas that way every year.
When I was young Christmas morning was my favorite day of the year but as I got a little older I began to like Christmas Eve even better, and it's still that way today. For me the best part of Christmas is Christmas Eve with just the immediate family, in my case Kris and I, and our dog, sitting in front of the tree listening to Christmas music, with maybe Perry Como singing “There's No Place Like Home For The Holidays” in the background.
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