Return to index

“Christmas Blizzard ”

Christmas 1966

By Charles Moon

     The thin ice of anticipation can be a dangerous thing for a seven-year-old boy. Even when the newly forming cracks in that ice rang out their warning sounds under the weight of a failing Christmas, I refused to turn back until it was too late and I found myself plummeting into the icy waters of faithlessness and disappointment.

      I’m sorry, Elizabeth, for the overly melodramatic metaphor. I know how you hate it when I write like that this. I will make an attempt to keep this as straightforward as possible. Please try to understand that this Christmas in particular was the turning point in how I have come to feel about the holidays.

      Christmas is more than a day; it’s an entire season. It begins with, or shortly after, Thanksgiving and, at least in the Branch household, continued through to January sixth, the twelfth day of Christmas. My holiday season in 1966 season began with Thanksgiving at Grandma and Grandpop’s house in New Jersey.

      The entire family had assembled on this crisp, beautiful day in November. There were no pending confrontations, no outstanding emotional debts in need of repayment, no unresolved issues of any kind. We were there in the spirit of pure festivity and celebration and as I remember it, that is exactly how the day unfolded.

      Holiday meals were always served in the early afternoon, splitting the day into two equal pre- and post-meal segments. I never quite understood why, but perhaps it allowed enough time in the morning to finish the preparation while also affording for a suitable clean up before everyone collapsed from over eating. After the traditional dinner of turkey and all the accompaniments, Terry and I, along with my cousin Sarah went out in the back yard to play. It was still daylight and the smell of dried leaves mingled with the aromas of the neighbors’ feast preparations. Three active children confronted by a pile of autumn leaves demanded that we jump into them. We did just that with all the wide-eyed exuberance of youth. It was the last time I would feel joy that year.

      When the menfolk had finished their coffee and smoked whatever their tobacco of choice was – Grandpop had not yet given up his pipe and Uncle Stuart still smoked cigarettes – they were dismissed by the women who began the arduous task of washing the mountain of dishes.

      Grandpop came out to the back yard where we were still playing in the now flattened and disbursed leaves and suggested we take a walk down to the park. What we referred to as the park was actually the end of a protected watershed flanking a small creek that began it’s journey to the Delaware river a few hundred yards away from my grandparents house. Where the water emerged from the ground as a babbling spring, the township had placed a pair of old cannons from the Second World War as a monument to its veterans. Beside the cannons were cement benches under the protection of a canopy of maple trees. Grandpop took us to the climb on the cannons and throw pebbles in the creek.

      By the time we had returned to the house, the sun had almost completely set. Andy and Sarah’s sister Barbara were sound asleep. Mom, Aunt Mary and Grandma were sitting at the table in the kitchen discussing where Christmas was to be held this year. It was not negotiable as far as our family was concerned – dad had to preach on Christmas morning so any travelling on Christmas day was out of the question. I was already anticipating a repeat of the joyous holiday of the previous year.

      Dad and Uncle Stuart were in the living room ignoring each other. There was very little for a meek Presbyterian minister to discuss with a blue-collar ex-marine before the conversation was exhausted. Grandpop gathered some wood from the protected stack on the front porch and quickly built a roaring fire in the living room fireplace. The yellow flames engulfed the cold logs and they popped as if there were firecrackers hidden under the bark. I stared into the golden light of the fire and knew that this holiday season was going to be even better than the last.

      It was not long after that day that I began to get the sense that something was very wrong. Terry’s birthday was the Saturday after Thanksgiving. Terry was not excited at all. Mom had baked a cake for his birthday and put candles on it, but there was no singing or presents. There was no party or visitors. And, dad was nowhere to be found. It was not unusual for dad to absent from family functions, especially at this time of the year. But, he had never missed a birthday before, even if it was only to sing a half-hearted chorus of “happy birthday to you” before sequestering himself in his study for the rest of the day.

      The next day was the first Sunday of Advent. As was our tradition, at least for the few years that I could remember it, we would gather in the dining room after dinner and turn out all the lights. Mom would light the first candle on the Advent wreath that would stay as the table’s centerpiece until Christmas and say a small prayer. Andy sat on mom’s lap, Terry sat across from me and dad wasn’t there, as usual. The first Sunday of Advent prayer was read verbatim from Christmas section in the Book of Common Worship without comment or explanation. Terry snuffed out the candle and we concluded this odd and meaningless ceremony.

      The rest of the week passed with an eerie tension in the air around our house. Mom’s normal vivacious personality was subdued, and she would wander through the house with a worried look on her face. She tried to force a smile when she saw us noticing her, but I knew something was amiss. I just didn’t know what it was.

      The next Sunday we did not go to church. Instead, mom privately met with some members of the church for most of the morning. I did not know what they were discussing nor was I supposed to – the door was kept shut and voices were kept low. Terry and I watched television and played in the house with Andy for most of the day. When the church people left, mom made a quick spaghetti dinner that we ate at the kitchen table. Afterwards, we assembled in the dining room for the lighting of the second candle of the Advent wreath.

      The lights went out, mom lit a long wooden match and lit the first candle. She opened the prayer book and held out the burning match to the second candle. Andy was on her lap and Terry was once again across from me as mom read emotionlessly from the page. It was now that I realized that not only wasn’t dad present, but I hadn’t seen him all week.

      My father’s erratic behavior was something that we did not discuss. I think mom believed she was protecting us, but it really only confused me. If she said everything was fine, we were supposed to accept it and pretend not to notice whatever was outside the realm of our parent’s normal behavior. That’s why, when I realized dad wasn’t there, I did not ask where he was. If nothing were wrong, then we would be told that. If, however, there were a problem, we would have still been told that everything was fine. Asking was pointless.

      In the middle of the prayer, Terry got up from the table.

      “Terry, sit down.” Mom scolded.

      “Why?”

      “Because we are not finished yet.”

      “Dad’s not here. Why do I have to be here?”

      Terry was fishing for information. He knew dad hadn’t been around all week and nobody was telling us what was going on. Mom did not take the bait.

      “Sit down so we can finish.”

      Terry opened his mouth to continue the arguing. Terry could argue indefinitely if his mind was set to it, but mom’s voice was tired and revealed a deep hurt. Somehow Terry knew that dad was the cause of it, so he stayed quiet. He also stayed standing. It was his way of letting mom know that he was not going to pretend everything was fine much longer.

      “Terry, please.”

      Terry folded his arms across his chest and sat forcefully down on the chair. He stared into the flames of the candles while mom finished reading the passage from the book and left the room as soon as she had finished. Mom turned on the lights and I snuffed out the candles. Andy toddled off into the living room oblivious to what had just happened.

      “Mom?”

      “Yes David?”

      I paused for a moment to make sure the words would come out in the right order.

      “Can I have a cookie?”

      Mom smiled.

      “Sure, Davie.”

      I had let her know that I was still willing to pretend that everything was all right.

The closer it got to Christmas, the harder it was to pretend. Everything was definitely not all right. Terry was becoming more and more obstinate and disagreeable. Mom was agitated all the time and Terry’s behavior only made matters worse. Dad was still missing.

      Decorations began to appear on all the houses on the block. The Pullowski’s house was draped with multicolored lights, stretching from one end of their front porch to a large conical hemlock tree at the opposite corner. Mr. Pullowski battled with a strand that continued to flicker, even though he had already replaced every bulb twice. Mr. and Mrs. Zearfuss’s house next to ours was adorned with garlands of fresh greens and red ribbons. A single plastic white candle-shaped light glowed in each window casting long shadows through the fine lace curtains out to the neatly manicured yard. It was a picture postcard of Christmas. Our house had last year’s wreath on the door. It had been stuffed in a paper bag for storage in the basement and was now flattened on one side and partially covered in a powdery mold. Mom did little to repair it and, this year it was the perfect symbol of our flattened holiday.

      Christmas Eve arrived with no one feeling joyous or merry. The same Christmas carols that illuminated our spirits one year ago were just droning background noise. We still decorated the tree, but it felt more like a chore than a part of the festivities. When the tree was complete, Terry did not stay in the room with us, but went back upstairs to our shared bedroom and closed the door. A car’s headlights passed by the window, going down our driveway.

      “Maybe dad’s home,” I thought and ran to the window to look.

      It was only the next door neighbor returning from a Christmas party.

      “Hey, it’s snowing,” I called out.

      It wasn’t easy to see the fine snow that was beginning to fall in the twilight of dusk, but soon the dusty white powder had covered the Zearfuss’s carpet of grass. Mom joined me at the window and looked out into the developing storm with a sweetly sad expression.

      “Look’s like we might get a white Christmas.”

      “A white Christmas!” I thought. I had never experienced one before, but I had heard about the magic of a white Christmas on TV. From the way adults wished for white Christmases, I knew there must have been something to it. A white Christmas might just fix everything.

      Terry was not impressed and Andy was too young to understand. Mom was preoccupied with whatever the problem was, and was still pretending it didn’t exist for our sake. I spent the rest of the evening watching the snow fall. And it did fall … with a vengeance. By the time I was ushered off to bed, there were already several inches of the frozen precipitation blanketing the city of Philadelphia, with no signs of stopping.

      The storm of Christmas Eve 1966 dumped over a foot of snow on the City of Brotherly Love. That would have been an unusually severe storm for any part of the winter, but this early in the season, it was clearly unexpected. The city and surrounding suburbs were paralyzed but in the spirit of the holiday they had decided not to ask emergency crews to plow and salt on Christmas Day. While it proved to be a wonderful gift for the city employees and their families as well as the children who could use the steeper streets for a day of uninterrupted sledding, it was the end of any hopes for people who intended to travel. That, of course, included my aunt, uncle, cousins and grandparents.

      I awoke to the whitest of all possible Christmases on Sunday December 25th, 1966. The undisturbed purity of the fresh snow reflected the morning daylight into my bedroom. The storm had stopped but the skies remained cloudy. Even so, everything was brighter and softer. Snow makes everything sound differently – muffled and crisp at the same time. Perhaps it’s because all the background noise of the hustle and bustle of daily life is suspended for a few hours letting the little sounds we normally ignore become the only thing to hear.

      The promise of the white Christmas turned out to be a lie. There was nothing remotely magical about it at all. Terry was angry. I can only surmise now that he was angry at dad for ruining Christmas, angry at mom for letting it happen I the first place and angry with God who we had been taught was ultimately responsible for everything. Then, I just knew he was making every effort to be difficult. In his ten year old mind, it was his way of dealing with the situation.

      Terry sat on the edge of the bed and looked out at the white mounds on the front porch roof that were covering the bottom half of our bedroom windows. He was not interested in stockings or presents or Christmas at all. He was old enough to realize what all the snow meant.

      “Nobody is coming.”

      “What?”

      “Nobody is coming, Davie. Grandma and Grandpop can’t come in the snow.”

      “Why?”

      “They just can’t.”

      Terry knew they weren’t coming but I don’t think he knew exactly why either. But he knew. And it turned out that he was right. A few minutes past nine, the phone rang. It was, as Terry had predicted, Grandpop calling to say they couldn’t come.

      We unloaded our stockings and opened a few wrapped presents. I can’t begin to recall what they were. We hadn’t been to church for services since Thanksgiving, although we had stopped by the building a few times on weekdays. We weren’t going to be going today either, even though it was Christmas day. The white Christmas had stopped that too.

      Shortly after the ritual gift opening, Terry and I put on our snowsuits to go play out in the huge drifts covering our front yard. I am sure it seemed deeper then because I was smaller, but the snow was inconceivably high and the whole block resembled a vast white wasteland. Instead of digging a path to the front walk, Terry and I dug a tunnel. We had to crawl on our hands and knees to get through, and it took us most of the morning to traverse the 40 feet from our front porch to the curb. Halfway to the street, a section the top collapsed creating an opening which turned out to be the best way for us to dispose of the snow as we dug it out.

      By the time we broke through to the sidewalk, Patrick Pullowski and his two sisters were in a toboggan, being pulled by his older brother through the tracks in the street made by a truck that had ventured out in the storm. Patrick asked Terry and I to join them for a ride down “suicide hill” at the end of the block. Suicide hill was actually a sloping section of easement between two properties with a small mound of earth at the bottom. Once the snow was packed down by toboggans and “snow saucers” the flexible flyers could take to the hill. The hard packed snow and ice was the perfect surface for the steel runnered sleds. If you rubbed an old candle across the runners, like waxing skis, you could develop enough speed to become airborne when you hit the bump at the bottom. Taking a solo trip down suicide hill in the winter was a rite of passage in our neighborhood. Terry and I would have gone but we were exhausted from our tunneling expedition and the sleds were in the garage at the end of 150 feet of unshovelled driveway.

      “I don’t want to go, Davie.”

      Terry declined the invitation.

      “Okay,” Patrick called back, and added with a wave, “Merry Christmas.”

      Patrick’s brother and sisters waved too.

      “Merry Christmas,” they all shouted in unison.

      “Yeah,” I thought, “Merry white stinking rotten Christmas.” Terry and I waved without saying anything.

      I climbed through the snow tunnel and emerged through the broken section of roof in the middle. I scrambled to the top of the pile where we had been dumping the snow we had dug out and stood with my arms stretch out with my back to the undisturbed drifts in the middle of the yard. Leaning back, gravity pulled me into the white expanse leaving a “David-shaped” hole. The snow was so deep that all I could see was the clearing sky above me. I knew Terry had joined me when I heard a muffled thud a few inches way. I moved my outstretched arms and legs back and forth, making the best snow angel I possibly could. Terry did the same thing. The cold fluffy powder on the edge of the indentation collapsed into the hood of my snowsuit and I got a face full of snow. What our family needed this Christmas was a real angel. We didn’t get one.

      We went back inside completely soaked and chilled to the bone, where mom made us hot cocoa and put out a plate of cut-out cookies in the shape of pine trees and stars, sprinkled with red and green granulated sugar. There were no games, no family, no crowds of people wishing us joy. There were no special presents or heartwarming moments. There was no big dinner either. Mom had returned most of the food to the refrigerator so we could gather as a family and have a post holiday feast once the roads had been cleared.

      We had one final tradition to complete before the end of the day. After dinner we went into the dining room and lit all the candles on the Advent wreath. Mom read the final prayer from the Book of Common Worship for the Christmas season. Terry sat silently uncooperative in his chair, arms folded across his chest in protest of the entire ritual. Andy was sleeping in his high chair, blissfully ignorant of the ruined holiday. I sat with my hands in my lap. I had carried the velvet reindeer mom made me last year into the room with me and now had it concealed under the table. My thumb and forefinger held onto the bell tightly so it would not jingle. There was no reason for me to hide the toy. It was, after all, part of Christmas. I was simply trying to prevent this awful holiday from taking the last bit of Christmas comfort I had.

      Mom lifted Andy out of his high chair after reading the prayer and carried him to his crib upstairs. Terry went to our bedroom without saying a word. I was left alone in the dining room with my small red companion. The sun had set and it was approaching my bedtime. I quietly said my own little prayer.

      “Thank god it’s almost over.”

      That house in Philadelphia had a butler’s pantry separating the dining room from the kitchen. A swinging door closed off the space from view when everyone was seated, but there was enough of a gap around the edge of the door to see if the lights were on. The lights flicked on in the kitchen a few minutes later.

      I pushed my head through the door, still holding on to my stuffed reindeer and saw mom sitting at the kitchen table staring into a cup of coffee. Her shoulders shook with each sob and this time she made no effort to conceal her pain when she realized I was in the room. I would have given anything at that moment to fix Christmas, but there was nothing that could be done. I leaned my head against my mother’s shoulder and cried with her.

      Ten days after the new year, all the trappings of the holiday had disappeared. Mom threw out the moldy misshapen wreath and when the garbage man tossed it into the truck the day before, it seemed to symbolize a fitting end to the season.

      Terry was watching television in the living room and I was playing with my model cars in our bedroom when the doorbell rang. I stepped into the hallway to see who was at the door. Mom turned the handle and pulled the heavy oak front door open. The next thing I heard was the sound of terry running up the steps as fast as his legs could carry him. His eyes bulged and his mouth was open. Tears streaked down his cheeks and the droplets left spots on his shirt. He flew past me, turning to the right and up the winding staircase to the third floor. I heard several loud thuds.

      I was more worried for Terry, than I was curious about who could have put him in such a state. I followed him up the stairs. At the top of the landing was a common hall that had three doorways. To the left was a small room with a utility closet that dad had used for listening to his short-wave radio. I poked my head in but he wasn’t in that room. Directly at the top of the stairs was mom’s craft room. It faced the back yard with two sets of windows that let plenty of light in. We were not supposed to go in there without mom. Terry wasn’t in there either. I turned to the right to the largest of the third floor rooms. The room was in the shape of an “L” and at the moment was only occupied by a few boxes and a sheet of plywood up on sawhorses that doubled as a model railroad platform. Around the inside corner was a large closet that gave the room its distinctive shape. The door was shut but at the bottom I could see a sliver of light coming from the single bulb that hung in the center. The door was locked from the inside and I could hear Terry’s heavy breathing through the wood panels.

      Footsteps and muffled voices grew louder as they climbed the first floor staircase. When they reached the bottom of the stairwell leading up to where I stood outside the locked closet separating me from my older brother, I recognized mom’s voice. Three steps more and I heard the other person speak. It was a man. It was familiar.

      “Oh my god. Dad is home.”

# # # # #

NEXT | HOME