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The first Christmas Eve of Sally's misbehavior came as a shock.
Inside a cocoon-like dark car outside Van Allen's Department Store, Clinton, Iowa. That's where Mother, Gram, Sally, and I waited every Christmas Eve amidst the jangle of Salvation Army bells and shoppers tramping through snow for Neni, my maiden aunt, who worked in hosiery. Christmas didn't begin for me until Neni was under our roof.
I would just die before Neni's short, stout form came swinging through the revolving door. Van Allen's was the only store in town with such a fancy door. Penney's and Klein's and Grant's all had straightforward doors. Klein's was where Mother would take me years later for my first bra. An old woman with pursed lips, wrinkles, and short dark hair fitted me, her impersonal hands pressing here and there to be absolutely sure this was done correctly. It seemed as if she and my mother were in cahoots about the importance of the first bra. It was important, I guess. A sort of passage.
Neni and Gram lived in the second-floor apartment of a big, gray house on Sixth Avenue. When I was little, we picked up Gram first on Christmas Eve. She came down the steps one at a time, leaning on her cane, wearing her good wool coat, and smelling of wintergreen she rubbed into her knee. Mother carried her speckled suitcase secured by two straps down the steps and stashed it in the trunk of our 1950 Plymouth along with shopping bags Gram had stuffed with presents. I carried Neni's turquoise overnight bag and the fruitcake an out-of-state relative sent Gram every year.
A farmer's wife, my mother was way into proper, probably because she'd been a school teacher for many years before she and Daddy were married. Her younger sister Neni was unpredictable. That's why on Christmas Eve and any other time, I was enraptured when she was coming to stay with us at the farm. She was the only person I knew who defied my mother—and she relished doing it. She liked to corral me into her escapades. Take, for instance, Sally my rag doll. Neni said she was naughty. I hadn't caught a whiff but Neni knew. Neni's real name was Geneva but her nieces and nephews couldn't pronounce that so she became Neni when we were babies and remained Neni all her life, even to the grown-ups (except when Gram or Mother were mad at her and then she became, "Geneva!").
Mother had some old, fragile ornaments. Every year she described lovingly where she got them when we hung them on our tree. And beginning to build my memories for future trees, Neni always gave me a new ornament or two. The silver teapot and sugar bowl decorated with pink roses and the elf sitting in a gold wreath holding cymbals, forever waiting for his cue, hang on my tree tonight. I'm seventy years old, but that elf is forever young. The roses are faded on the tea set, however.
Back to Sally. She was a rag doll, yes, but she had a soft leathery face, which could have been vinyl, although I'd be surprised if soft vinyl was available for dolls just post World War II. My other rag doll, Suzy Q, had been made by my paternal grandmother, Grandma Bliesmer. She had bright red yarn knots for hair and was very well behaved except her face got dirty. I don't remember how she got into dirt all on her own. Sally, however, had a little help.
One Christmas, we were sitting on the davenport together in the living room, Neni and Sally and me, watching the flames dance through the vents in the coal-burning stove that took up center stage. All of a sudden, Sally rose from her seat on Neni's lap and batted at one of my mother's ornaments. It swung back and forth precariously before it hit the thin carpet. Neni said, "Sally! You behave. You naughty girl!" But we couldn't control Sally and in two shakes of a lamb's tail, Sally had batted a second ball onto the floor where it rolled toward the mahogany end table. It came to rest under the rack that held the Farm Journal and The Saturday Evening Post. Neni was still remonstrating with Sally when Mother came in from the kitchen smelling of cinnamon and wiping her hands on a dish towel.
"What's going on in here?"
Sally was blamed. Her lack of self-control was found to be disappointing. But, the ornaments weren't broken. And the shock was—the world didn't end.
Every Christmas Eve, Mother waited impatiently for Neni, too, but not for the same reason I did. She worried we wouldn't make it home to pick up Daddy and get to church on time. I was part of the children's program on Christmas Eve, and we were all expected to go to church again Christmas morning.
We're talking a big Lutheran church in DeWitt, Iowa, in the U.S. Gram and Neni were never fond of Grace Lutheran because they were Swedish Lutheran, known then as Augustana Synod and Mother had converted to German Lutheran, Missouri Synod, when she married Daddy. Mother's adopted church wouldn't let Neni and Gram take communion there even though they were Lutheran. If they did, they could be in danger of hellfire because they might not believe every jot and tittle the same. That drew a huff from Gram and inspired rebellion in Neni. As a young child, I was stunned to discover that religion could be questioned, much less disagreed with. As an adult, I resolved the family schism by becoming a Universalist. I don't believe in hell, so there's no danger of someone who isn't the right kind of Lutheran going there.
Neni had her priorities, so she swallowed her differences to attend with us on Christmas Eve. After the children's program, the kids repaired to the basement where the superintendent of Sunday school handed out bulging paper bags. Cornucopia! Christmas candy, including those hard candies with a tiny sleigh bell or snowman stamped on them that had squishy centers, chocolate drops, again with squishy centers, an orange, an apple, huge walnuts that required a nutcracker, candy canes, and candy corn that scattered itself around in the bottom of the bag. The bags had only enough space at the top to twist into a handle kept tight by a red ribbon.
Temptation.
It seems Sally's misbehavior was contagious because Neni loved to put a bug in my ear. I was to tell the superintendent of Sunday school with as much sincerity as I could muster that my good friend Sally was home sick and couldn't come to the program and could I please have an extra bag to take to her? She would be oh so pleased. It worked every year.
On the trip home in the back seat, Neni and I opened our bags, releasing the scent of chocolate directly into our noses, which were practically inside the bags, and delved into our treasures. Without fail, the event and the subterfuge elicited a "Geneva!" delivered over her shoulder from the front seat by my mother.
When visiting us, Neni slept in the guest bedroom on the first floor. Usually I wasn't even allowed to sit on that bed because it was covered with a wedding-ring quilt, Grandma Bliesmer's wedding present to my parents. On Christmas morning, Sally and I would tiptoe downstairs early. We'd already opened our gifts when we came home from church the night before. We'd crawl into bed with Neni and there we'd stay except for now and then when Sally would inspire me to sneak into the kitchen to steal us a piece of homemade fudge. It was freezing cold in our farmhouse in the mornings. As time passed, we had a furnace, which was a huge improvement over a coal stove, but unless Daddy got up in the middle of the night to shovel coal into its hungry maw, the mornings were frigid. We three would snuggle under the covers while Daddy went down to the basement; we'd hear the scrape of the shovel in the coal bin. Soon the smell of dusty burning coal as heat blew through the registers filled the house and mingled with the scent of Folgers perking while Mother banged around in the kitchen, making toast and frying eggs that sounded like water bubbling.
Notoriously, Sally refused to go to church on Christmas Day. Mother left the choice to go or stay up to me. No contest. When she and Daddy and Gram came home trailing cold fresh air, Neni, Sally, and I were still in bed. My stomach was queasy because I'd stuffed a few pieces of Mother's soft, sweet, sinfully good divinity topped by a half walnut into my mouth along with the fudge. And of course, there was the holy bag of candy to continue exploring. Mother hung Daddy's overcoat in the hall closet while he hurried down the basement steps to refresh the furnace.
Mother stood in the bedroom doorway shaking her head at us "sleepyheads." I would have loved church, she told me. They sang all my favorite carols—"Hark the Herald Angels Sing" and "It Came Upon a Midnight Clear" and "O, Come All Ye Faithful." That was it. A minor attempt at guilting, actually more like an attempt to foster regret, and I was off scot-free.
We wouldn't hear, "Geneva!" again (except for the time Sally got into Neni's scarlet nail polish) until New Year's Eve when Sally and I stayed with Gram and Neni in town. Just before midnight, Neni instructed us to gather as many of Gram's pans as we could out of the kitchen cupboards and to bring two kinds of spoons—wooden and metal. Out onto the second-story screened porch overlooking Sixth Avenue we went and when we heard Guy Lombardo's "Auld Lang Syne" burst from the radio in the living room, we started banging on those pans and hollering "Happy new year!" as loud as we possibly could.
The End
Tagged in Christmas Nan Lundeen