Generations of Christmases at 105 South Maple

Counting my grandparents and our grandkids, five generations of Morain family members have celebrated the Christmas season from time to time in our house at 105 S. Maple in Jefferson. My parents bought it about 1944, sold it in 1973, and then Kathy and I became its owners in 1980 and have lived here ever since.

It’s heart-warming to recall how my family observed Christmas back in the day, how our family celebrated when our kids lived here, and how we “do” the season since the last of our children moved on.

Some things don’t change, regardless of whether the celebrations are past or present. In other ways it’s a brand new ball game.

I asked my siblings and our kids for their memories of Christmas in our house. Some of their recollections were predictable, some were of events and other stuff I had forgot (there’s more of that these days), and then there was stuff that was news to me.

The fireplace and mantelpiece have been front and center at Christmastime for as long as I can remember. Of course they have, since that’s where Santa makes his entry and does his thing.

On my mother’s side of the family, several of the womenfolk are knitters. Starting back before I was born in 1941, some of my aunts and great-aunts would knit large, colorful Christmas stockings from an identical pattern, replete with reindeer, Santas, snowmen, etc. At the top of the stocking they would knit, in large letters, the name of each stocking’s recipient.

That tradition continues to this day.

Every new member of the Garver side of the family gets a stocking. After a new baby is born or someone marries into the clan, the knitters race to claim the right to knit the stocking, sometimes getting into a gentle but insistent argument over who claimed first.

Kathy and I and all our kids have our stockings. They decorated our mantel for decades, and now they’ve gone to decorate the fireplaces or other locations at their own homes, together with the similar stockings of each of our grandchildren.

If any of the kids happen to be at our house for Christmas these days, there’s a hook under the mantelpiece for their stocking, just as there is for ours.

One of Mom’s prized Christmas decorations was a set of four large green ceramic letters that spelled “NOEL.” They graced the center of the mantelpiece every Christmas, and every Christmas we would regularly rearrange the letters to spell something else: “LEON,” “LONE,” or “ELON.” After a while Mom would notice and put “NOEL” back in its proper display. It was an exercise that lasted for weeks every Christmas season.

We alternated spending Christmas with Mom’s side and Dad’s side of the family. On alternate years we traveled either to Cedar Falls to spend the holiday with Mom’s older sister Verna’s family, the Smiths, or to Independence, Mo., for a stay with her younger sister Bertha’s family, the Johnsons. The other years we were at our house, and Dad’s sister Evelyn’s family, the Crists, drove up from Des Moines to celebrate with us and with Grandma and Grandpa Morain, who lived five blocks southeast of us.

My brother Tom says he was 15 or 16 years old before he finally slept in his own bed on Christmas Eve. Before then he was either in Cedar Falls or Independence, or else in a bed up in the attic to make room for the Crists.

One year Mom decided the house needed new toilet seats for the downstairs and upstairs bathrooms. She wrapped them in Christmas wrapping paper and put Merry Christmas tags for “Rick” and “Bill” on them. Brother Bill and I puzzled mightily trying to figure out what could possibly be in packages of that shape and size. We were not impressed upon unwrapping them Christmas morning.    

Mom used to raid the pantry for canned goods to make sure each stocking contained an equal amount of stuff.

Mom used to make plenty of Christmas goodies, and sister Debbie helped her with the fudge, white chocolate pretzels, spritz cookies and a candy called “rabadu.”     

Rabadu had been a recipe of Mom’s extended family for many years. No one knew where its name came from, or even what its correct spelling was. We all looked in dictionaries, recipe books and elsewhere, trying to discover its origin.

It wasn’t until years later that we learned that “Rabadu” was the last name of a family in Lamoni, Mom’s hometown, and that that family had provided the recipe.

Our kids remember things like learning where the squeaks in the staircase were, so they could sneak down early in the mornings before the Big Day to shake the presents under the tree to get hints of what was inside. (I seem to recall that sister Debbie learned the same thing about the stairs when she was a teenager, but instead for the purpose of tiptoeing in and up the stairs at a late hour so as not to wake up Dad and Mom.)

We would haul a “real” Christmas tree up the front steps every year, through the front door, and then drag it to its appointed spot in the house. Both our kids and my siblings remember going on needle patrol to pick up as many loose evergreen needles as possible, but some were still sticking into bare feet on the carpet in July.

Kids of all generations, in millions of homes on Christmas Eve or Christmas morning, can remember impatiently cooling their heels while the adults have another cup of coffee before the ripping open of the wrappings could begin. That was the case at 105 S. Maple for decades.

Our children have an age range of 12 years from oldest to youngest. The younger ones recall the frustration of waiting until one of their older siblings, who preferred to sleep in, would finally come downstairs on Christmas morning.

And all of us recall the years of singing Handel’s “Messiah” in our home or the homes of other families that made that tradition a required part of our Christmas season for many years.

For Kathy, it’s bringing forth the decorations and ornaments that have graced our home for decades of Christmases.

And for all of us it’s getting together for family time at Christmas.

I hope the season warms your heart as it does ours.