1970s Eagle Street Christmas

Christmas in the seventies was very different than Christmas during the previous decade. We didn't know that 1970 would be our last Christmas with Dad.  By then, he and Mom had ditched the idea of buying a Christmas tree every year.  In 1968, they bought a big potted live tree and hauled it in the house using a special wheeled tool that Dad built in his workshop.  It was painful to decorate it, and I mean literally painful, because the needles were very sharp.  It really took the fun out of it, and it became a chore that was endured, not enjoyed. When Christmas was over, we carefully took everything off the tree and wheeled it back outside. It felt good to have it done and over with for another year.

 Tiny in 1968, the first year we had the potted tree. There was lots of room to stack gifts because the pot was so large. After the gifts were opened, Mom hung tiny hotdogs on the bottom branches for the dogs.  Tiny is very carefully removing her little snack.

Here I am in 1970 with the puppy I got for Christmas.  Mom had no intention of letting me keep it, but I did get to play with him for awhile until Mom sold it. This was our last Christmas with Dad.

The big difference about Christmas in the 70s was the huge void left by our father's passing.  Also, by this time the older kids were no longer coming by with their children.  Patti and her kids had moved to Arkansas, Susan and her family stayed in Los Angeles for the holidays, Lynda was beginning new traditions with her own family.  We would see them over the holidays, but not necessarily during our late night Christmas Eve gift opening time.  Tim, Skippy and Darwin were no longer at home.  So it was down to just Mom, me, and the two little kids. 

I took over where Dad left off--dragging the Christmas box up from the basement, helping Mom decorate the tree, and bringing all the presents out of hiding to put under the tree after the kids were put to bed on Christmas Eve.  Mom also gave me the fun tradition of shaking the sleigh bells to awaken the kids near midnight to open their gifts. I would walk down the hall towards their bedrooms, jingling those bells and making a racket. Then I would yell, "Wake up, wake up, Santa just left, hurry, you might still see him!" The kids would jump out of their beds and run to the tree to see what was there for them. 

During the holidays, we didn't have a lot of relatives to play with, so we created our own fun. We liked to sing.

             Tammy and Gidget. Our first Christmas without Dad, 1971.  His yellow chair, the chair he died in, is empty.

                     Christmas 1972. Look closely in the tree and you will see hidden gifts.

There was always lots of music and singing on Eagle Street. I started playing the piano at a very young age, and although I hated practicing the scales, chords, dexterity exercises and the assigned pieces, I really had fun playing songs that my little brother and sister and I could all sing together.  Mom figured out real fast that I would stay at the piano for two hours a day instead of my mandatory one hour, if I was able to have a little bit of fun in the process.  So she provided me with all sorts of song books.  During the year, we kids would sing from the Disney movie songbook.  But starting in the fall, we would start practicing our Christmas songs.  I would give the little siblings something special to do for some of the songs.  Little brother would sing a solo line here and there.  Little sister would hit a piano key when I gave her the cue.

In 1972, I had to perform at a Christmas piano recital.  Jeff sang a cute song called, "The Little Skeptic." Little sis sang "Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer."

Here we are at the 1972 Christmas Piano recital.  We didn't have fancy shoes for dress up, so we went to our performance wearing our tap shoes from dance class.

Mom also made cassette tapes of us singing songs to send to her prison pal boyfriend and soon to be husband.  One actually survives to this day. It was made October 10, 1974, when I was 13 and the little kids were 8.  I ran across it a few months ago and listened to it today.  It seems like yesterday that we kids were all sitting there on the piano bench belting out Christmas tunes.  It would be so much fun to do it again.

During the 70's, Mom was obviously lonely, and she started befriending an interesting variety of similarly lonely or downtrodden people.  We never really knew who was going to drop by during the Christmas season, so Mom was always ready.  She bought little gifts, like socks, flashlights, pens, and other things that everyone can use.  She would wrap these small items and write a small number on the gift. Then she would hide them in various places deep into the Christmas tree.  In her notebook, she would record the number and what was in the package.  When an unexpected person came by, she would check her notebook for an appropriate gift, and then she would pull the gift out from the inner branches of the tree to give to the visitor.  Those simple little gifts would make these people so happy.

After about 7 years of use, the potted Christmas tree was getting cramped and obviously wanted to be free.  It stopped growing and started to die.  By the end of the 70s, we had abandoned the potted tree idea and were back to bringing home cut Christmas trees.

Christmas 1977.  We are back to using cut trees.  My little sister got the unicycle, and she learned to ride it well enough to include it in her clown act the following summer. Look at that hideous carpet. Mom loved it!

1979 was my final Christmas at home.   In 1980, I had left the nest and was experiencing my first freezing cold white Christmas in Indiana. Childhood memories still pull me back to that little canyonside house in a neighborhood that has changed so much over the decades.  Something calls me home every Christmas Eve.  I don't fight that pull.  It is my yearly tradition to return to 4071 Eagle Street and pay quiet homage, unnoticed by the current owners. And this year, like every year, I will take a brief nighttime walk past the house whose walls witnessed so much pain and laughter and so much drama. Even though the street will be silent and dark, my imagination will conjure up the sight of the bright Christmas tree, the smell of a fragrant log burning in the fireplace, and the sound of our traditional Christmas Eve sleigh bells.