If I asked any of my young grandsons to describe what coal is, they would probably point me toward a bag of Kingsford briquettes near the outdoor grill. Or maybe Google it or ask Siri and produce more information than I would ever like to digest on the subject.  But they wouldn’t know what a chunk of anthracite coal looks like or feels like, all shiny black and leaving dark dusty traces on everything it touched; they would not know what a room full of coal looked like, or appreciate how much of a part of our everyday lives it was in the 1950’s and 60’s.

Heating a home with coal is something you won’t find much in use today, at least not in Chicago, but in the 1950’s and 60’s it was pretty common on the west side. Coal fired boilers heated water in pipes that led to radiators in every room and hallway. Those radiators were the warm spots in otherwise drafty houses; school kids quickly learned that they were the best places to get dressed on cold winter mornings.

We had a coal bin in the basement of our two flat. It was a big room, more than half the basement, and in the early fall the coal company would drop a small mountain of coal in the alley behind our house. They also dropped off a wheelbarrow, a shovel, and a lone black man. He would move the mountain, one barrow load at a time, into that room, through a basement window. When he had packed the room floor to ceiling, wall to wall, he would roll up the canvas tarp that ran from the alley to the window and wait for the coal truck to pick him up at day’s end.  He never spoke and no one spoke to him and I think it was the only time I saw a black man in my neighborhood. I was about ten years old.

How the coal got from that bin to the boiler was up to me and my brothers. On winter nights we would fill buckets with a small shovel and drop them into the open hatch of this creature next to the boiler called a “stoker”.  It resembled a VW bug without wheels and it held about twenty buckets of coal. The stoker fed coal slowly all night to keep the boiler burning and the water hot.  And at the other end of this process was the burnt out coal, fused with other lumps into something we called “clinkers” because, well, they clinked when you hit them together. Clinkers needed to be raked from the bottom of the furnace regularly and then be dumped outside. They also served, once ground up, as a poor man’s rock salt, making it easier for cars to get through snow.

And that leads to my first Christmas story…the night my father, being in a playful mood no doubt inspired by a few holiday Budweisers, decided on a late night visit to the coal bin. He placed a lump of very dusty coal in each kids stocking before my mother got around to filling them. When she awoke on Christmas morning, she was greeted by children whose faces, hands, pajamas and robes were covered in black coal dust. I recall she was not very happy.

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Christmas in our two flat was celebrated on two levels. On the first floor, my Grandmother’s floor, we held the entire living room captive with our Lionel train set. On the second floor, where most of my family dwelled, was the rest of Christmas.  The tree in the front window, mounted in a metal cylinder stand with three colored lights, fabricated by some long ago fireman buddy of my dad. The Christmas manager lived in one of the bookcases, the night sky backdrop coming from a roll of blue Red Cross cotton packaging with saliva activated silver stars pasted on. Italian lights had not been invented yet, so our lights were all on the tree, plugged into one impossibly overloaded outlet, ala Christmas Story. Stockings were hung across the living room mantle, in order of age.

My mother was a Christmas mastermind on almost every level you could conceive. With a family of eight children, she somehow managed the entire process from buying the gifts to hiding the gifts, to getting them all correctly placed in the living room, each set of gifts placed for each child in a clearly marked area corresponding to the placement of their stocking,. She knew what the Christmas season, with all of its hype, did to us. It turned normally well behaved little Catholic boys and girls into shrill, self-centered and above all greedy little SOBs, driven half-mad to locate their gifts prior to the Big Day.

Jesus and Mary and Joseph were the reasons for the season, or so the nuns told us at school, but as the day approached, we continued to regress.  Ironically, the Church was said to have invented the placement of Christmas Day on the 25^th of December to offset the pagan rituals of that time of year. But by Christmas Eve we were mostly proper little pagans, eager for our loot.

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The train set was another story, another little world really. Those Lionel train sets were iconic in the 1950’s and 60’s. I’m guessing every kid-occupied house in our neighborhood had one. But while most of them chugged in a circle around the tree, ours was an oval layout some ten feet long by five feet wide, and in the middle of that space was a rapidly growing little town known as Plasticville. The Bachmann Company, seeing opportunity from those millions of train sets, made these snap together buildings that needed no glue and could be easily disassembled and stored.

It started with a small replica of a malt shop with the name Frosty Bar, but each Christmas my brothers and I asked for more and more buildings and Santa delivered. My mother, perhaps not wanting to see the town go to hell, also located a church that played Silent Night, and soon became the center of town. The little town hit boom times when my Uncle Jimmy, then a bachelor living in the basement apartment, began to date a widow named Marsha. Marsha, later Aunt Marsha, owned a hobby shop on Chicago Avenue. Jackpot.  Our little town soon featured an oil well that bubbled, switch tracks, and anything else Jimmy could buy to further his cause with his new love.

We were geeks, to be sure, and played almost the entire Christmas vacation with the train set, complete with figures we painted, named, and assigned various positions in town. Being boys, of course, meant the town required destruction two or three times each day.  The Attack of the Giant Dog, featuring the current puppy, was a favorite, as was frequent invasions from our collection of green army soldiers. But the absolute best was the Christmas our sister Maureen, now working for the phone company, bought us Great Garloo, a battery operated plastic robot monster just made for the job of destroying small towns.  Old Garloo could be depended upon to pick up houses and drop them on other houses, push speeding trains off tracks, topple light towers, and generally strike terror into the small plastic hearts of the town’s occupants.  Heck, it was usually too cold to go outside anyway. 

We were typical kids of our time, getting limited outside information from the scarce programming on our black and white television sets and radios. Telephones were still pretty much the property of adults and off limits to us, and our world centered on our home and church and school and extended no further than the range of our bicycles. But there were lots of kids on our block and in our schools, and I think we were sort of “rough around the edges” city kids. I think we thought of ourselves as tough kids, whether or not we really were.

My mother wanted nice kids, not tough kids, and she tried, like most mothers, to keep alive our belief in Santa Claus as long she could. Not easy when there are so many different ages in one household and some know the truth. She told us from the beginning of Advent that “Santa was watching”, but we knew he couldn’t be everywhere.  My brother Billy was convinced that it was a tale concocted to drive our good behavior, nothing more than a scam.  He asked her one day how Santa could see everything, be everywhere, like God, for crying out loud. And that was when my mother pulled out the Meeting Birds.

She pointed to the electric wire outside the kitchen window, where sat a flock of sparrows. She asked us if we ever noticed how they seem to be discussing things with each other, turning their heads, chirping? These were the Meeting Birds.

The sparrows on the wire, she told us, were looking in our windows, observing our behavior all day long, comparing notes with each other, and then flying back to Santa to record their observations. Did we notice how they weren’t there at night? They weren’t just mentally challenged birds, unable to figure out how migration worked. They worked for the Big Guy! We were stopped cold in our tracks. Santa was an abstract, maybe a legend, but you could see the damn birds right outside your window. What if she was right?  You would not want to take that chance.

It was and still is an artful and inspired bit of parenting.  

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Christmastime always pulls us back to our homes, to our beginnings, our families and their stories. As the world gets crazier, colder, louder, more dangerous, and as information washes over us in ever increasing waves, memories of those Christmases become a very dear safe harbor. To be sure, time softens the edges of those memories, drops disappointments to the rear, and air brushes out any pain and discomfort that certainly had to accompany the joys of those days. Time acts like a salve, dulling the aches and enhancing the good memories.

Leo Tolstoy, the author of Anna Karenina once wrote, “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” I am grateful looking back through those years that my family was like so many other happy families we knew. I remember we seemed a simple people, closer to poor than wealthy, but not really wanting for much.  We had our common faith, we had our jobs or our schoolwork, and we had good friends and good neighbors. We felt safe, even if it was the safety that comes from being insulated and protected from most of the world.

As families grow up, the children go down many different paths, achieve different levels of education, accrue different amounts of material wealth, live in different zip codes, and sometimes have different values. But when I think of those long ago Christmas days, I always see my brothers and sisters as sort of the same child and the child looks and sounds a lot like me.  As if somehow we were just one child and we were happy.  If there is magic in Christmas, it lives somewhere around there.

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