HAPPY HOLIDAYS

Here's a recital of the holidays I celebrated while growing up. It seems that every month of the year had at least one day of significance to capture my interest. 04/20/2016

HAPPY HOLIDAY

While growing up, holidays seemed to occur in every month of the year. Here’s how I recall celebrating some of them.

As a small child, my sister would awake me in time to celebrate New Years Eve. At midnight, I would lean out the apartment window and bang a spoon on the bottom of a pot, adding to the general din of the occasion. Freezing cold weather tempered my joy of merrymaking.

February offered an opportunity to celebrate the birthdays of Lincoln and Washington in my grade school years. They were not co-mingled. Each stood alone. We often wrote essays about them, or put on some sort of pageant or play in recognition of their achievements. My credits included helping to row across the Delaware, pretending to throw a coin across the Potomac, carrying an axe toward the wood pile and reciting the Gettysburg Address.

That same month forced me to deal with the dreadful angst of St. Valentine's Day. In third grade my heart beat wildly for Virginia O’Keefe, but she spurned my passionate glances. Neither she nor any other girl ever gave me a Valentine card. Nobody loved me. This explains everything, Dr. Freud.

The Lenten season of March and April always began with a visit to church on Ash Wednesday. The smell of burning incense delighted me. After a quick prayer, with ashes flying off my brow, my feet would fly me home where I would find hot cross buns made by our local baker waiting for me to devour.

Easter meant one thing to me in those days: Candy! All during childhood, my folks gave me a huge solid chocolate cross, surrounded by jelly beans, made by a confectioner named Lofts. When that place of business closed, my interest in celebrating Easter took a nose dive.     

Come May, come Memorial Day. Everyone wore red paper poppies to commemorate the WW I dead. All the local Hoboken grade schools, both public and parochial, participated in a Track and Field competition on the campus of Stevens Tech. In eighth grade, Gigi Taylor beat me in a 50-yard dash despite my five step lead at the 40-yard marker. He jet propelled past me in the next few bounds. He went on to set high school records before attending Notre Dame on a field and track athletic scholarship. Memorial Day is forever etched in my mind as the day this speed king left me eating his cinder dust.

June is my birth month. On my tenth birthday, my parents allowed me to have a party. No one showed up, dashing my hope that someone would give me a Monopoly game, my passion at the time. I had to eat the entire cake myself. That cheered me up.

July featured Independence Day. My vignette, Yankee Doodle Dandy, describes fully my recollection of those firecracker- filled times, a “bang up” celebration.

Muggy August days provided me with the perfect time to go swimming, either in the Hudson River, the Palisades Amusement Park pool, the man-made Lake Culver during my annual two-week trip to Camp Columbus, or in the Atlantic Ocean at Point Pleasant. I loved that month long holiday.

September began with Labor Day, a holiday I hated as it meant the end of summer and the start of another school year. That’s what kind of labor I thought we were celebrating and it made no sense to me.

October and Columbus Day became synonymous. Hoboken staged a parade, complete with marching bands and fire trucks, ending at a city park named Columbus where politicians gave speeches in his honor. Italians comprised half the city’s population at the time, some thirty thousand of them.

I celebrated Halloween during my childhood in a far different way than it is currently observed.  My boyhood friend and I would dress up in corduroys, fill one of our mom’s stockings with flour, and then venture out to engage in warfare with girls. When we spotted one, we would whirl the stocking around and whack the unfortunate wench, leaving white evidence of our attack on her behind. We used chalk and crayons to mark up girls clothing, store front windows, or automobiles. We played pranks. As a young teen, in the company of a group of pals, we slipped a 2x4 through the two brass handles on the entry doors of the Masonic Temple. We rang the bell and laughed at the futile efforts of the caretaker who found it impossible to push the doors open.

November provided me a chance to enjoy two holidays. On Election Day, young boys cooked “mickies” in tin cans, swinging them around their heads to promote roasting. With luck and effort, the potato might actually cook to a small burned and blackened delicacy that only Huck Finn might enjoy. No matter how bad it tasted, you would claim it tasted great.

Every American celebrated Armistice Day by stopping and offering a silent prayer at 11:00 a.m. on November 11, the precise time World War 1 ended in 1918. This event took on more meaning for me after learning that my mother’s youngest brother, Lawrence, had suffered permanent lung damage after being gassed at the front.    

My family celebrated Thanksgiving Day just the way Norman Rockwell painted it. We feasted on roast turkey with all the trimmings: Cranberry sauce, mashed and sweet potatoes, string beans, little white onions (for my Dad), turnips (again, only for my Dad), and the sweetest muffins this side of heaven.

Prior to eating, my friends and I would dress up like ragamuffins and go door-to-door asking neighbors if they had anything to give us for Thanksgiving. Usually, we had to sing songs in backyards to win a reward, such as a penny, a piece of candy or fruit. Over the years, this tradition morphed into Halloween trick-or-treating. I blame the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade for this change in local customs.

My family celebrated Christmas in a traditional but somewhat subdued way. As a child, I sat on Macy’s Santa’s lap. A stocking hung from a wall, filled with candy, but I often feared that it might be lumps of coal, a fate that befell bad boys. The corner vegetable store sold us our tree that we trimmed with just a few ornaments and a handful of tinsel. My brother always set up my fabulous Lionel Electric trains near the tree. At the moment, they are stored under my desk. A collector appraised their value at $350. They are not for sale. They are priceless.

So are my memories.

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