Christmas memories

Christmas is a time for memories.

And a time for recalling those memories.

My friend Mark predicted, before I had written this week's column, that I would be writing something about Christmas on Killough Valley in the Ozark hills over yonder.

Well, OK.

Of course, my earliest memory of Christmas predates Killough Valley. The first Christmas I remember must have been when I was about 4 years old. We lived in St. Louis at the time, on Geyer Street just a few blocks from Tower Grove Park, in one of those wonderful 19th-century houses that had, during the war, been converted into apartments.

We lived upstairs. Off the entry hallway were doors to downstairs apartments. In one of those apartments lived a girl my age -- Christy? Debbie? Becky? -- whose parents had put up a cardboard fireplace with bright, red, exaggerated bricks and a roaring fire of yellow and orange crepe paper.

My mother explained that the fireplace was how Santa got into the apartment. In my 4-year-old imagination, I assumed the Santa I had seen at one of the department stores would come into my friend's apartment, leave presents, and then lug his big sack of goodies up the stairs to our apartment, since we didn't have a chimney of our own.

I now know, of course, that the whole bit about Santa coming down chimneys is a fairy tale.

He has keys.

My best Christmas memories after we moved to the Killough Valley farm in 1950 included cutting a cedar tree a couple of weeks before Christmas and loading it with decorations without any electrical plugs. We had no electricity.

We would find just the right cedar with its scratchy boughs and make a stand using two-by-fours and baling wire and hang the fragile red ball ornaments and ropes of gold garland and enough silver tinsel to test the engineering of our homemade tree stand.

It was, as I recall, the most beautiful tree in the world.

When electricity came to Killough Valley, we added a string of red and green and blue and orange lights, the kind with the big bulbs that got hot enough to catch your tree on fire if you weren't careful.

In the nights leading up to Christmas, we would turn on the tree lights for about 10 minutes -- 15 minutes at the most -- and take in the wonders that electricity had wrought. We would sit in the living room and stare at the tree and watch the tinsel flutter as the hot bulbs heated the room, which was quite a ways from the wood stove in the dining room. I never got tired of watching the Christmas tree on cold December nights.

It was, as I recall, the most beautiful tree in the world.

Then we got a TV set. "I Love Lucy" and "The Millionaire" held our attention, and many nights we didn't even turn the lights on.

With few exceptions, today's TV fare is no substitute for hot lights on a tinsel-laden fire hazard.

Our first Christmas tree after we were married we had no extra money, but when we saw this particular tree outside the IGA on North Oak Street Trafficway in Kansas City where we had just spent our $20 budgeted for groceries, we couldn't resist.

We managed to get the tree into our living room and set about adding the only decorations we could afford: red-and-white peppermints wrapped in cellophane. We cut pieces of red thread and tied each piece of candy to a branch on the evergreen.

It was, as I recall, the most beautiful tree in the world.

Nowadays there are real trees and artificial trees. There are big trees and little trees. There are decorations of every kind. There are expensive ornaments and homemade treasures like the ones our sons made when they were little.

The best Christmas memories cost so little but are so priceless. I wonder whatever became of that cardboard fireplace. Or the little girl on Geyer Street.

They will always be among my Christmas treasures.

R. Joe Sullivan is the editor of the Southeast Missourian.