A Chicago Christmas, plus French, 1973

Two healthy parents, a brick bungalow, and a public school

In the dark evening, with our Christmas tree’s colorful lights and sparkling ornaments and my reading lamp, the atmosphere is filled and rounded and saturated by my favorite winter piano music. George Winston, Vince Guaraldi, not just the Christmas music but all of it. I relax completely, reading in an armchair next to Tom. 

The Christmas tree attracts my eye again and again. I’ve had many of the ornaments since early childhood, and I love them. Being stored out of sight most of the year means they’ve never lost their evocative power. The sequined Santa Claus boot my mom made, the silvered-glass balls with a recessed winter diorama, and the pine cones I collected with my parents at the Christmas-tree farm. My mom put just a little silver glitter on them — not nearly as much as I would have, at age nine — and my dad drilled tiny holes in their stems to accommodate wire hooks. Two of those stems still endure, so we have two 50-year-old glitter-gilded pinecones on our tree today. 

Seeing these ornaments is when my parents and my nine-year-old self feel the most present. In my mind we all appear at our round dining room table, doing these craft projects, right over there. I was full of fizz, jumping around, “helping” my parents adorn our new house for the holiday. 

The music app of 2023 keeps streaming gentle instrumental music. A certain melody starts that makes me raise my head from my Kindle, see the tree, and close my eyes. Emotion fills me. Tenderness, fragility, a wealth of feeling. It’s a carol I learned in fourth grade French.

Fourth grade was the year that Kilmer School kids who were good readers started learning French. I loved reading, and to be rewarded with French was a mind-expanding thrill that made me feel recognized and confident. Later in the fall season, another thrill: we started learning to sing Christmas carols I didn’t even know existed — in French! Our teacher wrote out three French carols with phonetic spellings, plus "Silent Night" and "White Christmas" in French. They covered all the blackboards, even the ones in the back of the room. It must have taken her forever. 

We sang them every day after we practiced our lessons. I loved singing, and I’m so glad we did it in school, because I’ve rarely had the opportunity since. My French class went caroling inside the school, along with the older kids also taking French, on the last day before break. But it wasn’t over. I’d have these songs with me forever.

The snow-globe of this memory is fragile glass I don’t want to break. The feelings inside are ones that had no words — because I was nine. I felt my feelings, and I acted them out. I recited my French lessons to my parents and translated them, and I sang the French carols nonstop. The melodies would not stop playing in my head, they were so beautiful. Memorizing the French lyrics felt like a miracle, almost as if I’d always known them. My parents laughed over how smart I was, already caroling in French. 

That was a great Christmas, in 1973, also highlighted by my best school friend coming over to make “glitter pictures” at our dining room table. Supplies, plus permission for two little girls to make a giant glitter mess without giving it a thought, provided by my mom. She wanted me, an only child, not to feel like one. My friends, and all the neighbor kids, were as welcome as if they’d been siblings.

At nine, in fourth-grade French, in a new old house fixed up by my dad and decorated by my mom, with a best friend next door and a best friend from school, I was inspired and happy. My two friends and I liked to pretend, creating retro-futuristic scenarios in which we were priestesses with the power to communicate with princes entombed in stone. The world was ours. I took for granted I would expand into a wise and laughing woman like my mom and would be practical and capable like my dad.

I want to put my childhood feelings into words, but can I do it without breaking the snow-globe, is the dilemma. The tenderness I feel towards my family at that time is too precious to lose by turning memories into stories. But I do it anyway.

By the next Christmas, our lives had changed. My mom had been through chemotherapy and radiation and surgery during 1974, and then found out she was terminally ill. Her mother moved in to care for her. By Christmas the next year, 1975, my mom was in bed, and had only about two weeks to live. By that time, I had lost my fizz. The world was not mine at all. I don’t think I really got my real self back, my inspired and energetic self, until I was in my 40s.

***

This is the French Christmas carol I heard on my streaming app that put me inside that happy, sealed-off snow-globe. We sang it a lot faster than this at school, but this version gave me space and time to dive into what I was feeling.

Un flambeau, Jeannette, Isabelle

Un flambeau, courons aux berceau

C’est Jésus, bonnes gens du hameau,

Le Christ est né. Marie appelle ah, ah…

I still remember the words to two verses!

It’s free to subscribe. Thank you for reading.