Christmas Day: For heart and home
Christmas 2022. The first Christmas I remember for sure was 1956. I was 8. There must have been earlier Christmases I recall, but these are indistinct. They are all jumbled together in my head. Christmas ’56 was the real deal. I remember lying in bed on Christmas Eve and shaking with anticipation.
What was Christmas like in the long, long ago? We have some idea because there’s a record, both written and verbal. For instance, George C. Marshall, the World War II Army general and later Secretary of State, told his authorized biographer, the late, great Forrest C. Pogue, that Christmases at his family’s residence on West Main Street in Uniontown in the 1880s and 1890s were wondrous affairs.
“We had a very large dining room,” Marshall recalled. Across a “considerable hall” was the library. The Marshall children — George, the youngest, his sister Marie, and older brother Stuart — would wait in the library while their mother (Laura) and father (George Sr.) trimmed the family Christmas tree.
“The tree … was at the far side of the dining room … and always” had “a white bear rug” at its base, Marshall said. The presents were placed around the tree on the rug. “Of course, there were all sorts of decorative illuminations in the tree.”
(Notice: not ON the tree, but IN.)
There was always a “featured” present in the Marshall household. As the baby of the family, George received the lion’s share of these.
“I remember once they gave me” a miniature stage which his parents had purchased at a toy store in Pittsburgh. “The thing … I delighted in” were the floodlights, “which were quite dangerous, incidentally.”
“When the [library] door was opened and we were introduced to our Christmas tree … here were the tinsel and glitter … and the presents … and featured was the [stage] lit by its own floodlights. [It] looked magnificent to me.”
Another year the “featured” gift was a typewriter for George.
Marshall recalled to Pogue a Christmas in which Marie received “a little chip diamond ring” which caused her to “scream” for joy. “My brother,” he said, “got his roller skates and began dashing around the dining room. Of course, I right away wanted them – as I seemed to want anything that the others got.”
And to think, this little guy would grow up and win the Noble Prize for Peace.
Despite such petulance, “these Christmases were delightful,” Marshall said.
“We could eat all the fruit we wanted. We could eat all the candy we wanted… So we had … a perfectly charming evening… Going to my friend’s house in the dim dawn of the morning [was] very dismal … compared to the … animation of … Christmas at home.”
And on we go.
The year 1909 in the coal and coke trade featured slack employment, labor unrest, and mine accidents which killed and maimed scores of local miners. But Christmas Day in the “patch” towns dotting the Fayette County countryside was festive, a newspaper account declared.
The Frick Coal and Coke Co. distributed 50,000 tons of candy on Christmas to some 40,000 children, with senior citizens and Sunday Schools and churches also getting in on the act.
The company engaged various Santa Clauses for the candy-giving: a man by the name of Wallace Ryland played the jolly old fella at Continental in South Union Township; mine superintendent Ramsey carried out the duty at Leckrone; and James Petroni portrayed Santa Claus at Lemont Furnace, where a thousand boxed treats were distributed in just over an hour.
On hand in some patches to help out were prominent community leaders. For instance, the editor of the Uniontown Daily News Standard, W. T. Kennedy, traveled out to Lemont Furnace.
The lines for the candy formed before nine on Christmas morning. “The old people” and children were equally “grateful” for the manna from management, it was said.
“All care and worry were cast aside and everyone is given the utmost freedom” to enjoy the day “consistent with good order,” the newspaper story declared.
There was little rest for the weary, however. The following day, Dec. 26, was a regular workday. It was back to the hazards of mining coal.
Merry Christmas, Scrooge. And Merry Christmas to each and every one of you. May memories of this day lighten your heart for years to come.
Richard Robbins is the author, most recently of, Troubled Times: The Struggle for Wages, Recognition and Power in the Age of Coal and Coke. He can be reached at dick.l.robbins@gmail.com.