Baby, It's Cold Outside! Christmas in St. Louis (Part I)

The winters in St. Louis, Missouri were bitter cold and our Christmases were often white with snow. I grew up in a three-story, brick Tudor home built in 1928 in one of the first "gated" communities in the United States. The neighborhood was beautiful. A guard's gate, designed by architect T.P. Barnett, towered 64 feet at the neighborhood's entrance and behind it, stately homes spread across 140 acres of rolling hills that included a park with a large pond, wide sidewalks, and a Spanish fountain located in a round-about (yes, there was a round-about long before they recently became so popular in the U.S. today). When I was very small, the gate reminded me of Cinderella's castle. Today, the neighborhood is listed on the National Register of Historic Places and was the last planned community in the St. Louis area before the Great Depression hit.

When the neighborhood pond froze over, kids grabbed their skates and headed to the park where they often skated until nearly frost bitten. Hobbling home on frozen feet and snot-sicles hanging from our nostrils, my mother greeted my brother, sister, and me at the front door with the same questions every time we piled into the entrance hall, whining with tears in our eyes that we needed help: "What's wrong with you kids? You don't have the sense God gave a goose! Why don't you come home before you get this cold?" She helped us peel off our gloves, stripped off our wet socks, and pulled off our boots. Then she vigorously rubbed our hands and feet to get the blood flowing before she allowed us to hold them in front of the cast iron radiator to warm them up. "Make sure you warm those toes and fingers slowly," she would say. "I don't want to find them rolling around on the floor when I vacuum." While we warmed our fingers and toes, she went to work in the kitchen making hot chocolate and homemade doughnuts. By then, smiles returned to our faces while we planned our next adventure.

Aside from our annual drive to Florida for vacation each summer, Christmas was the major event of the year. In retrospect, I realize how much work my parents put into making these celebrations special. And they were. Preparation for winter alone was daunting. My father took down screen doors and replaced them with storm doors, made sure the snow and ice chains were on the wheels of the car (the car, because until I was in high school, there was only one family car), stored bags of salt in the garage for ice on sidewalks and driveway, and had wood delivered for the fireplace. As soon as the holiday neared, he spent an entire weekend putting the outdoor colored lights on the huge fir tree that sat at the edge of our front lawn. He was always so proud of that tree when he finished and lighting it up was as big an event as lighting the tree in Times Square. I can still see him looking out the front door when he switched on those lights. With hands on his hips, he declared: "Best damn looking tree in the neighborhood!" Every year, he said the same thing.

Mom worked just as hard in preparation for Christmas. The house was scrubbed - that term can be taken literally - from top to bottom. All the crystal was carefully washed, all the silver polished, and all the table linens washed and ironed. When this was completed, Dad dragged home a tree. After installing it in the living room, he spent an entire Saturday putting lights on it followed by Mom, my brother, sister, and me to decorate it. We unpacked the ornaments, exclaiming over each one as if we had never seen it before and then carefully hung the treasure on an available branch. By the next day, our ornaments were usually moved to another location on the tree where Dad felt they looked more perfect. It didn't matter though, all we could think about was the fun and gifts that would ensue. And the tree always did look perfect, so we pretended not to notice the changes and helped him finish the tree by draping it from top to bottom with shiny tinsel icicles manufactured from an alloy with lead coated tin.

This new and improved tinsel didn't catch fire or tarnish under the heat like its silver or aluminum and copper predecessors did; instead, it exposed children to heavy metal. By the end of the 1960s the FDA realized the tinsel put children at risk for lead poisoning and the product was replaced by an even better idea: plastic, which created a problem of its own. Because tinsel is mess regardless of what it is made of, every year families dumped mountains of plastic tinsel into the trash until, at last, the damned stuff became practically obsolete. However, in those days, we loved our beautiful, shiny tree trimmed with heavy metal and thought nothing about how our hands moved from the tinsel we had handled directly into the Christmas chocolates box where we found a piece of candy to pop into our mouths without once washing our hands. Oh, the bliss of ignorance.

Preparation for the Christmas Day feast took my mother an entire week. She had to grocery shop on a weekend when the car was available. The dinner menu was the same every year and no one complained because it was wonderful. A twenty-pound turkey stuffed with bread dressing. She prepared a side of oyster dressing just for herself because it was her favorite. No one else would touch the stuff and that was fine with her. Of course, on the table one could also find mashed potatoes, gravy, cranberry sauce (canned and jellied, of course!), green beans, rolls, an assortment of olives, date and nut cake, pumpkin nut bread, and pumpkin pie with whipped cream, her specialty. None of this, other than the cranberry sauce, was premade or packaged. Everything was prepared by my mother, including making and rolling out pie crusts. In my memory, I see her smiling the whole time. That meal was truly prepared with love. While I miss this feast, I can't even begin to image rolling out my own pie crust.

In the meantime, my parents found the time and energy to take us three kids downtown to see the Christmas window displays and out to lunch at Stix, Baer, & Fuller, the department store where my father worked. Built in 1892 and occupying an entire city block, the store bragged a tearoom called the Missouri Room on the sixth floor of the eleven-floor building. The original tea rooms opened in the first half of the 19th century so that women who did not have a male escort for lunch had a place to dine with other ladies while out to shop. Eventually, the tea rooms became luxury dining as opposed to eating at a diner or lunching in a dime store.

This was my favorite day! We went to the city! We ate in a fancy tea room! We rode an elevator! We ran reconnaissance in the toy department! We dressed in our best winter attire! I loved completing my ensemble with black patent shoes and socks with white lace ruffles. Boarding the public bus headed downtown, we geared up like soldiers going into battle, donning wool coats, hats, scarves, gloves, and galoshes to protect our good shoes. This attire predated the lightweight fabrics of today. Coats were heavy with faux fur or another layer of woolen lining. To provide extra protection, our gloves or mittens were at least an inch thick, making it impossible to pick up anything smaller than a Cocker Spaniel. Our boots or galoshes had to be large enough to fit over our shoes and looked like the tires on the bus. Despite being weighed down with a good fifty pounds of clothing and feet wrapped in Goodyear tires, we walked zombie-like into the department store, our little faces, already red from the cold, flushed with excitement. In the warm elevator, our snow-laden clothing thawed. Soon we arrived at the ninth floor where Dad met us in his office and we were helped in removing our outer layers of clothing wherein, small, well-dressed children emerged. I was so proud of my daddy who had his very own office and a "private" secretary, which meant he did not have to share her with anyone else. In his suit, crisp white shirt (that Mom ironed and starched) and tie, he was so handsome, and he was my guy. "Come on, Karrie," he would say. "Allow me to escort you to lunch." As we walked ahead of my mother and siblings, I did my best to ignore them and strutted hand-in-hand with dad as if he were my date, thinking everyone would believe I was grown-up. Looking back, I realize he was no more than thirty years old. So young. With my hand in his, I sensed his pride. He delighted in parading us through the store to introduce his family to his colleagues, but I think he also took pleasure in showing off for Mom and us kids. He was an up-and-coming young executive with three children, married to a beautiful wife, and owned a home in the suburbs with a car in the driveway. In the 1950s, this was the American Dream come true.