In my childhood, as far as I was concerned, Christmas began on Thanksgiving with what we called "the Santa Claus parade" and came to culmination as the household stirred to life early on the great Day a month or so later -- a day that took forever to come and came to an end far too soon.

 

That time of my life is memorable for the closeness and care of parents who were rich in heart and hope. They had worked their way out of the mire of the Depression and started a family -- beginning with me -- just seven months before the onset of the second European war. Life for us was sometimes complicated by Dad's 12-hour, seven-day-a-week work schedule in a defense plant and at his sister's flower shop in a downtown Detroit hotel.

 

Christmas was very busy in the flower business, but Dad excused himself from going to work both there and at the plant on that day. How he brought off the latter, given the times, I cannot tell you. But it is a fact that he went on to become an effective lawyer.

 

Christmas was Dad's day as much as it was that of the one who, it is said, was born in Bethlehem on December 25. The centerpiece of our Christmas was a huge, fresh conifer trimmed and decorated after we of the lower forms were nestled all snug in our beds, lacking only Professor Moore's sugar plums performing minuets in our heads.

 

The Day began as my sister and I -- and later younger siblings -- awakened the parents and begged to go downstairs to see what we hoped each year would be a glorious tree alight and with good things round its base. We were never disappointed. The rubric required Dad to go down first to kindle the logs in the fireplace and switch on the strings of lights that had been woven through the branches of the fragrant spruce.

 

It was Dad's custom to make certain that a blue light appeared at the apex of the tree. No angel perched up there. "Blue," he said, "is the color of the Blessed Mother." It was just about there that the Catholicism into which he had been born and christened ended. But never mind.

 

We were told to remain at the top of the stairs until he had "put on the coffee," as was said in our house. Only when that aroma had intermingled in egalitarian fashion with the sharp odor of the spruce were we permitted to descend to the lower floor.

 

And, behold, there it was in its evergreen fullness with baubles, tinsel and other pleasant gewgaws mocking the hurts and sorrows of a war even then being waged far away.

 

That magnificence would remain in our living room for the 12 days of Christmas, after which it would be shorn of its glowing ornaments and unceremoniously dropped at the curb to await the trash collection. I hated the 12th day -- learning much later that it was the eve of Epiphany, which, with exquisite mythological rhetoric, ushered in the magi, their humped-back beasts of burden bearing tributes of gold, frankincense and myrrh.

 

(An aside: A priest I knew at one time kept three cats in his rectory, whom he called Shirley, Goodness and Mercy. When they had gone to their reward, he adopted three more and christened them Goldy, Frank and Murray. His call summoning them to their supper was something one did not hear every day.)

 

The end of any year insofar as I was then concerned was January 6, not December 31. When the Christmas tree went and the decorations were packed up and taken down cellar, a general blah overtook life for a time.

 

At about the age of 8 or 9, during a spell of such blah, a copy of the Book of Common Prayer came into my possession. How it came and by what agency I am unable now to recall. It was bound in a kind of leather with a gilt Latin cross embossed on the cover.

 

Leafing through its thin, fragile pages one day, my eyes fell on the lessons for March 25, being, as the bold-faced type at the top of the page pointedly insisted, the Feast of the Annunciation. Therein I came upon a passage reporting that Mary had been made pregnant with a child whom she was to name "Jesus."

 

With March 25 on my mind, I went straightaway to my mother for a review of that portion of her birds-and-bees story in which I believed she had specified nine months for gestation. That she had done.

 

Thus did I rejoice exceeding glad because I had in my hands official confirmation that, nine months from the twenty-fifth of every March, Christmas would come again. Such was my hope.

 

Even then I thought I could detect olfactory evidence of the spruce.

 

A weird kid, I? Oh, yeah.