Editor’s note: This is another column in Bill Boyd’s new series, “The Way It Was,” about growing up in Marysville. Bill continues to work with the Union County Historical Society to obtain information for his stories. With Marysville and Union County celebrating Bicentennial anniversaries in 2019 and 2020, respectively, these articles help depict what life was like in those early years.
–––
When I was a kid during the late 30s, I don’t think you could find an artificial Christmas tree for sale in Marysville if your life depended on it. You might find a few in Columbus, but artificial trees in those days were not very good, and if you could find one, I don’t think you would want to buy it.
But Marysville had a good selection of real trees to choose from. They were sold on several parking lots and vacant lots in town.
Picking out our tree was pretty much a family affair, as we all wanted to put in our “two cents worth.” We always selected a short needle spruce tree. That type didn’t hold its needles as long as a longer needled pine tree, but my mother thought they looked more “Christmasy.”
My dad would tie the tree to the roof of our car, and we would head for home. When the tree was unloaded, he went to the back stall in our barn where he kept the scrap lumber he used to build a base for the tree.
The decorating started with the lights. Our lights were pretty old. I think my parents bought them sometime in the 1920s when they lived in Pennsylvania. Those old Christmas lights were wired in “series,” so when a bulb burned out, the whole string of lights went out. We had no idea which one of the bulbs had burned out. So we took a new bulb and started at one end of the string of lights, replacing one bulb at a time.
When we replaced the burned-out bulb, the whole string lit up. It could take quite a while to check all those bulbs, especially after the tree was fully decorated. During the Christmas season, we would have several bulbs burn out, so we spent quite a bit of time looking for the bad bulbs.
We usually left our Christmas tree up for several weeks, so it dried out a lot, and when we started to take it down, the needles began falling off. I don’t mean a few needles at a time … I mean thousands of them. By the time we got all the decorations off the tree, almost all the needles were on the floor, and our tree looked like a “Charlie Brown” Christmas tree.
Maybe that’s one reason why we switched to an artificial tree several years ago. The ones made nowadays are pretty good. Oh I know, there are still some “purists” who don’t like artificial trees, and they insist on the “real thing.” I don’t have a problem with that, as I used to be like that myself.
Of all the years we have decorated our house for the holiday season, I think the Christmas of a few years ago was one of the most memorable. One of our neighbors told us their daughters would like to help us decorate for Christmas. At our age, we could use the help, and besides, we really enjoyed those three young girls, whose ages ranged from about six to 11.
They got to our house soon after school let out for the day, and then went right to work. Our daughter had already put up our tree, but the kids added a few more ornaments. Then they started decorating the rest of the house. They really enjoyed it, and the youngest girl was fascinated buy some of the miniature displays in our living room. And my wife and I enjoyed watching the girls.
This probably sounds pretty normal, so what made the whole thing different than other Christmases? It was that these young girls were not Methodists, Presbyterians, Lutherans or Catholics. They were, in fact, members of an orthodox Jewish family. They moved into our neighborhood several years ago, and we became friends.
When the decorating was finished, we sat around the living room and chatted. We talked about Christmas, and also about Hanukkah, for it would start in just a few days. We had several questions about that, and the oldest girl answered them all.
I bet you don’t know many people who had their Christmas decorations put up by orthodox Jewish kids. It gives me a nice warm feeling when I think about it. I think that just might be part of what Christmas is all about.
Those wishing to contact Bill Boyd can e-mail him at bill@davidwboyd.com