Glass Wax Christmas - Harrowgate - Philly - 1950s

My early memories of Christmas put it starting about two weeks before the holiday in the late 1950's. 

The Department stores: Lit Brothers, Gimbels, Stawbridge and Clothier and the top end carriage trade store John Wanamaker all started things the day after Thanksgiving. Going to downtown Philadelphia was an outing for us kids and we came downtown using the elevated train, the Frankford El. The trip was more window shopping than buying. 

The close to home activities would begin in earnest about two weeks before the holiday. No doubt Christmas budgeted items came out of the weekly paychecks closest to December 25th. 

Recycled items such as a flat plastic sheet, nativity scene, for the upstairs bedroom window came out of the cedar chest along with foil covered paper-mache bells for two living room windows and a plastic Santa's head with an internal light went on the outside of the front door. Single candle sticks were in each window on the front of the row house and with a single blue bulb each. 

The lighting of the window lights was a sacred nightly ritual.

One innovation or marketing gimmick I remember was the use of stencils on the windows with a glass cleaning product called Glass Wax. The product was to be spread on windows, let to dry, and then wiped clean with a dry cloth weeks later after Christmas. In this holiday use, you would sponge the opaque pink liquid onto Christmas type stencils of angels, Santa Claus, a snowman and a reindeer etc. It was all very primitive in terms of marketing but magic in terms of a hands-on participating childhood.

I don’t know when others bought real live Christmas trees but we bought ours as close to Christmas eve as a day or two and it sat in the yard until Christmas eve when the older kids got to stay up late and decorate it with blue glass balls and a single string of blue lights. The only thing not blue was a gold glass beaded garland that wrapped the tree from head to foot. That and metal, not plastic, silver icicle strands. 

In any case the house smelled of a pine tree that had been cut only days before and traveled from upstate.

We did not have or want those new Sputnik Trees, all artificial aluminum branches and serenaded with a rotating multi-colored light. That was the kind of tree that older people without children went in for. 

Of course I had my doubts how Santa would get to every house in the world – I was already thinking globally. I accepted the facts as my parents relayed them. Santa may come in person but more than likely we would get a surrogate, a Santa’s helper and making deliveries out of an old Nash automobile (they had big interiors). That was how it all worked according to my parents in order to insure my ever growing questions about this whole scenario. 

My most vivid memory was waking up at about five a.m., it still being dark, and looking down the stairs at the blue ornamented tree that was not there when I went to bed. The tree stood in the dark with a strange glow of street lights coming through open blinds and muted with a glow of light off a recent snow fall. 

I remember the excitement of opening presents. Turkey dinner was not a big deal. 

The big deal was the imagination and anticipation and the thoughts of magical myth that gripped a young child’s mind of five.

John Wanamaker's (Macy's) Philadelphia


_

Good News of Miriam - Novel - Chapter 17

Having a precious jewel in one’s possession sounds great, the problem is holding onto the jewel.

Unfortunately, after I spent some quality time with Jesus that day, I kept running into what I will call the committee.

Those surrounding Jesus were a mixed bunch of people. There was an outer core of James, his brother, Mary (another Mary), his mother along with assorted cousins and half brothers and half sisters. There was also this Simon person. They also called him Rocky or Peter as a nickname, perhaps as an invention of sarcasm. It takes intelligence to understand and appreciate the dark humor of sarcasm.  I learned that well from my Greek plays, especially the more formal comedies.  In any case, sarcasm was completely lost on this Simon person.  And lost on James too as well I might add. These were the original ones of his hard core Galilee base.

This outer core, with the exception of Rocky, were all family. This family did not seem to be a very close family that I could see.

The closest circle were what I called the worldly ones. They were Matthew the tax collector, and two brothers James (another James) and John.

James and John, the brothers, were called the “sons of thunder”. Whenever they were around, their loudness and boyish enthusiasm centered all attention about themselves and the subjects that they were to talk about or address.

When one brother spoke or preached, the other usually joined in to accent a point of conversation or start a play on words.  And there were many words to choose from with many local dialects.  In a way, if James got silence on any given line of a preaching idea and it went dead in the faces of the local native, it was John that then threw in an assortment of words, local, Hebrew, Greek, Latin or even Persian to finally get a response on the faces of those being preached to.

If I had not known differently I would have thought these two were theatre folk doing short comedies and using plays on words as comedic technique to emphasize some fact stated.  That and using their gesture of the hands waving or slapping each other in the chest as each made points to a story or a debate within a story.  They had the talent but not the polish of the theatre people I had recently met and associated with. 

All in all, the best of them, this Jesus crowd, had a country bumpkin air about them.  Even if the sophisticated Jerusalem urban types would see this country cousin veneer, some could see through to the strength, self confidence and even arrogance of the northern Galilee local culture in these two brothers.

Even Jesus with his charisma could not compete with their energy and this horsing around of James and John once it was ignited. The only time I saw Jesus laugh was when James and John got together into their verbal mischief and childish pranks.  It was they who went ahead of the group and scouted out any town or village that would be willing to welcome Jesus as a visiting preacher.

This Matthew, James and John sub-committee were also the one time followers of the martyred John the Baptist figure.

I have heard lately that Jesus was supposed to have been a cousin of this Baptist fellow. I heard no such thing when I first encountered Jesus.

The next layer surrounding Jesus had to do with the rabbis and scholarly crowd.

It was here that Jesus was most successful. His knowledge of most of the Jewish sacred and semi-sacred texts was phenomenal. He had a perfect memory.

I understood from my old friend Hiram that there were many sacred Jewish texts floating around. Some cults were focused on one or two ancient books. Only a handful of scholars had any idea what the true inventory of sacred books was in the Jewish culture.

There was something Jesus had once disclosed to me. As a recognized child prodigy with a perfect memory, he was made to recite volume after volume of Jewish law. In fact, Jesus looked back with regret. His name and fame as a child was that of someone more like a freak going from town to town and from synagogue to synagogue for a small fee or donation.

Jesus wept. He felt that he had been denied a childhood because of his talents.  And like many children denied a childhood, he had seen too much of the complex and many times corrupt workings of the adult world.

Let us get back to the committee…

For more sample chapters:

Good News of Miriam

Mormons in Secret Merger Talks with Catholics

An internal coup has happened in Temple Sqaure since its temporary approval of gays rights within Salt Lake City limits? Remorse. Regress. Stop the madness!

I guess the magic, Black magic? of re-baptizing all my dead Catholic relatives has brought the Vatican round to recognize the one true magical kingdom in Utah.

For a second there, I thought I saw the word merger between these great noble institutions in America. Their “shared moral principals” are no doubt the basis of secret ongoing merger talks. I doubt that it will ever be an outright merger. But I can see Joseph Smith, Prophet and occasional horse thief, being raised to RC sainthood or even Church Father status based on his forged and plagiarized writings.

Thank the white Caucasian God that Solomon Spaulding is long dead. Though I am still in hopes of another Mark David Chapman document to surface saying that Joe Smith on his death bed converted to the one true church via the Jesuits. That would reassure me.

I did not see this in any American MSM, talks being secret you know. I first saw it in the Guardian UK, which because of Britain’s diversity these days and quasi-official Church of England thing, that paper has an excellent daily religion section. I am not certain how the secular atheist New York Times handles religion. It may be in the Arts section with the recipes.

Well anyway, if this is a PR handout, then the American papers did not want to touch a tired old religion story of two dying, declining Old Testament like entities, the Church of LDS and the RC Church America INC.

Searching around I found this breaking story on the Catholic Blogosphere and Utah Newspapers dreaming of glory days past and ahead in current joint efforts with the RC hierarchy.

Merger talks are good. A shrinking believer base makes it necessary. Shared corporate expenses. Shared Hate Non-Profit organizations to push gay-bashing and more restrictions on women’s right to choose.

Mormons, Catholics must defend religious freedom, Cardinal says

PROVO, Utah -- The fight to defend moral principles is linking Mormons and Catholics like never before.

"In recent years, Catholics and members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints have stood more frequently side by side in the public square to defend human life and dignity," Francis Cardinal George told nearly 12,000 students, faculty and community members gathered Tuesday at BYU.

"I'm personally grateful that after 180 years of living mostly apart from one another, Catholics and Latter-day Saints have begun to see each other as trustworthy partners in defense of shared moral principles."

Mormons and Catholics join forces

Last Tuesday, in a speech called Catholics and Latter-day Saints: partners in the defence of religious freedom, he told an audience that Catholics and Mormons must stand together as a "vital bulwark" against those who wanted to "reduce religion to a purely private reality".

“Trustworthy partners in defense of moral principles” – I heard (a rumor) all the U.S. Bishops have been down to Mississippi and had sex therapy along side Tiger. I am reassured. We would not want to have to share females in all those group marriages in Utah with the paps, would we? Though if you think about it, with polygamy, there are plenty numbers potential in the possible altar boy/future priest category.

“Reduce religion to a purely private reality” – well hell yeah, who wants the Mormons or the RC Catholic bullshit on the public platter. I thought religion was supposed to be private.

If “defense of religious freedom” are the new code words for “forced religion” in the public square – fuck it!.

I am glad that Studebaker and Packard are in secret merger talks. The Mormons and Catholics together really represent the future. Yeah right.