Wednesday, November 11, 2020

Home For Christmas by Susan Branch

 

This is a wonderful, delightful reminiscence of Susan Branch's family Christmas in 1956. She was inspired to write it after reading a book last Christmas to her five and seven-year-old nieces. 

The book I chose for the girls told the tale of a grandmother describing to her grandchildren what Christmas was like when she was young, a passing of memories that took us back in time. I've always loved stories of life in the "olden days," hearing the jingling livery of a horse-drawn carriage, the sound of long skirts sweeping the floor, a teacup settling into a saucer in Emma's garden ... it's the closest thing to time travel I know.

I'm like that, too. I've always loved stories from the past. And Christmases in older times seem so special to me. 


Somewhat shockingly I must admit that Susan Branch's memories are of "olden days". Shockingly because those were my childhood days as well as hers. She was nine and I was eight in 1956. I tried to find a picture of me that Christmas but apparently my mother didn't take pictures of every Christmas and occasion in our lives. This fact in itself sets 1956 apart from 2020. Do you know I have over 70,000 pictures (and videos) in my iPhotos on the computer?! Granted they could use some culling - a dozen shots of one daylily for example - but still. I managed to come up with one of me in 1956. Wish I could see what that book is. It almost looks like a booklet of some kind.

It feels like just about every single thing is different. You don't see many large families anymore. It surprises Margaret when I tell her that I was the odd duck as a kid, being an only child. I can think of just one other in my class. Hazel knows several like herself. Susan writes:

... everything we had was made in America. Milkmen left glass bottles of milk on our porch, gas cost 30¢ a gallon and was pumped by an attendant. There were individual jukeboxes on lunch counters - for a nickel Elvis, Doris Day, Little Richard, or Buddy Holly would serenade you over your banana split. At school we practiced cursive on huge blackboards that covered the walls, and lined up to get our polio vaccines. Girls wore dresses for everything, to school, for roller skating, hopscotch, and cartwheels, too - and every boy on our street had a six-shooter and a coonskin cap. Drive-in movies were wonderful, under the stars, the whole family went to see Lady and the Tramp, us in our jammies. We had rotary telephones and a party line, and the new thing in the living room called television.

This was a middle-class white American family, like so many others in those days.

My dad got a job with General Telephone, so they moved from Long Beach to the San Fernando Valley. That's where I grew up, along with my seven brothers and sisters in a pink-stucco four-bedroom house my parents bought for $16,000 with help from the GI Bill. ... We didn't have a lot of money but just enough, apparently, because we had the basics, warm beds, clean jammies, friends, shoes, grilled cheese sandwiches, and parents who loved us. I always thought we were rich because I felt so happy. ... There wer 53 children living in the twelve houses on our dead-end street, and more coming all the time. ... Bikes made us totally mobile from about six-years-old. Parents didn't worry as long as we told them where we were going and were home for dinner.

Olden days, indeed. 

But the thing that still lives, that still rings as true as then is the love in the family. I would hope younger people than I am will read this to see that though some external things change, love in a family is timeless. 

"Are we rich" I asked my mom. "Not rich in money," she said, "but rich in love. We have each other. That's what counts." It was a highly satisfactory answer. It sounded exactly like "Yes."

This is Susan Branch's family in 1956.

22 comments:

  1. I enjoyed reading about your childhood. Sometimes I long for those simpler, happy times and the people that were there with me.

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    1. I think you would love this book! Worth buying!

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  2. I would love to know what you're reading in that photo! And also what's on the arm of the chair to the left of you.

    I have no idea how many photos/videos I have on my phone and computer, but it's a bit ridiculous. Every now and then I get the urge to go through and sort/delete what's there, but it's too overwhelming of a task, so I leave it be. Thank goodness we don't have to pay to get film developed anymore!

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    1. I don't know what that is. It struck me as looking like a remote but there was no such thing then! Maybe a bookmark.
      I don't keep any on my phone. Every few days I transfer them all to the computer, and we have two or three back ups to keep those babies safe!

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  3. Thanks for this heartwarming post. I have Susan's book on my Wish List and can't wait to read it. Enjoyed the excerpts you shared as well as that wonderful photo of you!! You're so lucky to have it -- my parents took very few photos of us as kids.

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    1. The quality of some of my old pictures is spotty - some are quite good and others not. I don't think people in general took as many pictures in the past.

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  4. What a happy post! I loved it and love that picture of you in 1956. Those little socks and shoes - so cute! Thanks for sharing the memories...

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  5. I bought the book and enjoyed it very much. Susan and I are both born in the same year so many of the memories resonated. Not the family size, as it was just my brother and me. And ditto on the lack of photos - hardly any. Just a few black and whites with the deckled edges.
    Mary

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    1. And kids now will look back and have zillions of pictures of themselves!

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  6. I'm so glad you liked this book. I loved her three biography-based books and was wondering whether to go ahead and splurge on another one. The sister under me is the same age as Susan, I four years older. What you've written today is so much the story of our family too except I have 3 younger sisters. But the time, how different it was. Good for some of us although not so good for others.

    I love the picture of you in your Mary Jane's!

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    1. I read her others and loved them. Absolutely worth the splurge!
      And you are so right about it being good for some and not others. Susan Branch is very clear in expressing how very lucky she was.

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  7. I’m a little older, but it all rings true for my childhood.... I think it is sad that children today miss out on the “roaming all day ..home for dinner. Even our children had that to some extent, but they were the last of the “free roomers.” I do love how Susan Branch tells her story.

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    1. Probably depending on where you live, there may be still places where children are safe to do so, but who knows. Certainly not now. Nothing really safe just now.

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  8. Nan, this was the loveliest post I have read all week - thank you so much for that!
    Yes, it was different when we grew up. I say "we", because even though I was born in 1968 and my childhood happened in the 1970s, it was still a different world from today, with many similiarities to what you describe and what Susan Branch wrote.
    For instance, there was only one child in my class in elementary school whose parents were divorced. We didn't wear dresses for everything, but we didn't know that something like brands for clothes even exist, nor did we care. Our bikes were used almost daily, and our parents had no way of knowing exactly where we were when we went out on them until we came back home in time for dinner.

    Your Mary Janes are lovely, and I can easily recognize you in that little girl's face!

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    1. Oh, how that pleases me!!
      My husband was just talking about feeling so embarrassed as a kid because his parents were divorced. And he didn't like having a different name from his mother and step-father.
      Happy you could still see me in that picture!

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  9. Sadly, I only have (2) books from my childhood, we gave the rest to another family but, I recall owning Christmas in the Country - the cover is so familiar to this day. Nan, are you tall? You look tall in that picture at that age. I was 5'5" but now 5'3 & 1/2" LOL (so they told me at my October physical.)

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    1. Oh, you had that book, too!! Even though you don't still have it, that pleases me so much.
      I was 5'6" or 5'7" - not positive which, and now Tom just measured and I am 5'5". How does that happen??!!

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  10. Susan Branch's book looks like something my sisters and I would love. Though there were just three of us, the families around us had 5 or 6 kids. Our whole circle (we grew up on a street that was a circle with a big green gully for drainage in the middle) was full of Baby Boomer children. I'm the same age as you, Nan. We all went trick-or-treating, caroling at Christmas, sledding, ice skating, and picnicking on "Cow Hill," the pasture land adjacent to the neighborhood houses. My sister still lives on one of the streets that spokes out from the circle but Cow Hill is all houses, the ponds drained, but still some good sledding can probably be found.

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    1. I loved skating, but it is hardly ever done now. Actually, I've read that the winters haven't been cold enough to keep the ice all winter long. But oh, the days I went, skates tied together and hung over my shoulder. The hot chocolate in the shack. It was wonderful. And I had a hill not too far away that my friend and I would slide on. It seems most people old and young say "sledding" but we always said "sliding".
      I love it that your sister still lives there, even with the changes it is "home".

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