REKINDLING THE MEMORIES OF CHRISTMAS PAST

Christmas is when it is so cold that the hairs in your nose stick together, frost forms on the scarf over your mouth and the snow underfoot does not crunch but squeaks unpleasantly to the ear.

I calculate with a jolt that I have by now spent more Christmases on the California coast than I did in the cold of Upstate New York. But after 27 years I still can’t get used to it. There is something more than a little illicit about being able to be warm outdoors on Christmas Day.

It is extremely pleasurable, like sneaking a hamburger on a Friday used to be in those barbaric times when meat on Friday was still a Don’t. And there is the same nagging suspicion that a penance will have to be paid sooner or later. Having meat on Friday was eventually resolved into a Do, but it was already too late, and the erosion of certitude had already begun.

The warm Christmas remains a guilty pleasure. Even the briskness of nights in the low 40s and bright but cool and breezy days does not prevent Christmas from sneaking up on you and taking you unawares--if your subconscious is still waiting for snow and freezing cold.

Of all the holidays, Christmas is the most fraught with memories, and in a warm climate they sandbag you. They escape unbidden from the unlit and cluttered closet of the past, mixing amusement with recollections touched with strong sadness.

I find myself thinking, after a lapse of decades, how foolish it was that the runners on new sleds carried a coat of red paint. It meant that the first thing anybody lucky enough to get a new sled had to do was drag it along a bare sidewalk with a rider aboard, to grind off the paint, because a sled hardly slid unless the runners were bare and shiny steel.

Christmas memories, the same memories, play differently as your years go on, like eccentric reruns that are forever changing after their prime-time premieres.

I telescope a handful of childhood years into one, the dividing line between pure childhood and afterward being that one tremulous and terrible season when you had to pretend not to believe in Santa Claus because, against all rationality and the pressure of cynical peers, you still did believe, or at least wanted to desperately.

It is easy to summon the storybook aspects of those small-town Christmases--walking up a twisting hill road called the Winding Stairs and into the woods to cut a tree, being bedded down early and then awakened for midnight Mass (standing room only, the aroma of eggnog in the congregation competing with incense on the altar, the once-a-year visitors dozing off in the rear pews).

The later overlay on those memories is how thin the facade of warm security was, and how difficult it must have been to preserve it for the children.

Hammondsport was a wine town and Prohibition had given it a decade’s head start on the Depression. By the years of my memory, Prohibition was nearly over but the Depression was just gathering momentum. The rent on our house was $22.50 a month, and a struggle. The presents tended toward the useful (as Dylan Thomas said in “A Child’s Christmas in Wales”) and the homemade, scarfs and socks and sweaters of a hair-shirt bristliness.

As I realized later, there were sometimes the heirloom presents, transferred from one house to another, to augment the array beneath the tree--a set of Dickens inscribed but I think not read by a great-aunt long gone, and, one year, a great-uncle’s wooden tool chest full of wondrous instruments I hadn’t a clue how to use but wish I still possessed.

Re-experiencing those distant Christmases through grown-up eyes, I see how, for the grown-ups, they can only have been small oases of hard-won cheer and hope for better times, set amid gray uncertainties that matched the standard weather.

I can’t say that I have come to miss those days when, as they used to say in the Upstate winters, the mercury hung three clapboards below the bulb; and yet there was something about numbed feet and chapped wrists that helped you feel you had earned whatever Christmas brought.

It may be that Christmas is just too easy out here. Yet the evidence of your eyes is that, while the oasis of good cheer and optimism is incalculably wider than it was in the 30s, it is still set within hard times and gray uncertainties for too many, no matter how blue the sky is.

Memory, like a knifing wind out of the North, tells you that a humbling gratitude is as ever the order of this day, for all that is OK in your life. And I wish all who read this better times, in any weather.