The Right Chemistry for Christmas : Feuding Parents Discover the Gift of Communication

This article first ran on Christmas Day, 1982, and was met with a warm reaction from readers. It is reprinted today for those who missed it or would like to read it again.

After a typically brisk but pleasant fall, Indiana’s winter in 1931 had turned on us with a savagery that was as frightening as it was numbing, and the closer we came to Christmas, the more bitter it became.

In my whole 9 years I had never felt the wind-driven snow lash at me with such maniacal fury, defying me to bundle myself in such a way it couldn’t pierce my defenses.

It seemed almost a personal vendetta as I plodded through knee-high snow to and from school, sobbing for breath and clutching my fists so hard in the mittens that my fingernails would sometimes draw blood on my palms.

It was as if everything bad that could happen had all descended at once. In my gloom, it seemed that nature was blaming it all on me and punishing me, and me alone, for what had gone on.

I didn’t use words like hell at the age of 9, but that was where everything that had made my life so pleasant and happy in rural Indiana for so long had gone. The Depression that had begun two years earlier with the collapse of the stock market in New York (I was to learn later) finally had flowed into, engulfed and laid waste to our little isolated world.

Paper Faltering

Our only bank had closed and the pleasant, ruddy-faced president of it who was my father’s friend had gone to prison. My father’s weekly newspaper was faltering, even though subscriptions were at an all-time high--there was no cheaper entertainment in Brownsburg than to spend $2 a year to keep up on the local news. But the flow of $2 rarely was in cash--no one had any--but in barter: hams, eggs, home-canned goods. So, while we had eaten well, if monotonously, the food didn’t pay the paper bill, or the ink bill, or the $13 a week that Old George in the back shop expected every Friday.

As advertisers fell by the wayside, and the Brownsburg Record stumbled, my parents had become estranged, separated, and then were quickly divorced at a time when such things were rarely done. Worse yet, in the eyes of our insular and proper little town, my father had chosen to install his new wife in the house where I had been born, while my mother, an unmarried sister, my older brother and I took up residence across town in a drab and drafty pseudo-Victorian house near the railroad tracks--half a world away from my warm and comfortable roots on Main Street.

It would be doubly hard this year, I knew, because my father always had viewed Christmas as his own, private excuse for lavishness--an expansiveness that always had pained my frugal mother. Toys spilled upon toys--electric trains, Lincoln Logs, a miniaturized, redwood replica of Fort Dearborn, a huge, cast-iron model of the Spirit of St. Louis, an even bigger aluminum model of the Graf Zeppelin, file upon file of toy soldiers in hand-painted detail, the largest Flexible Flyer sleds on the market and the speediest of Irish Mails. And always the grandest 10-foot Christmas tree in town and the most lavish outside decorations. All gone.

And my worst fears were realized. With the Christmas tree lots getting as much as a dollar for a six-footer, my mother waited until Christmas Eve to bring home a scraggly, ill-formed, four-foot tree with a crooked trunk that had been thrown out. It was blasphemous. Everyone knew that eight feet was the absolute minimum and that you had it up, fully decorated, two weeks before Christmas.

No Support Check

My mother, in embarrassment, had tried to condition me not to expect too much--there was no money except the $30-a-month support and alimony check--but it didn’t stop me from hinting, for weeks, for a new sled replacement, a sleek, but expensive ($2) model of Frank Lockhart’s Indy 500 racer that was in the window of the local hardware store, and sundry other playthings. As a sad concession to the Depression, I didn’t even mention to anyone my real, and unattainable, heart’s desire--advertised both in Sears’ catalogue and in the pages of the Open Road for Boys magazine--the fabulous, top-of-the-line chemistry set produced by Chemcraft, complete not only with wonderful little wooden tubs of exotic chemicals for home experimentation but with test tubes, beakers and a ceramic mortar and pestle. But, at $15--more than an average man’s salary in 1931--I might as well have wished for the town’s water tower.

Unrelenting, the weather worsened on Christmas Eve and in my upstairs bedroom in the old, rickety house on Vermont Street--buried under a half-dozen blankets, quilts and comforters--I could watch my curtains billowing under the onslaught of the wind rushing through the leaks around the window. The house had “central heating” in the form of a big, bulky coal furnace in the gloomy basement that belched hot air up through open grates in the living room and dining room, but any heat rising to the bedroom grates above had to survive the drafts whipping through the first floor. Little of it made the trip.

Christmas morning and it was even worse than I had feared: a small cluster of lead-cast Tootsie Toys (10 cents apiece) in the form of Indy racers under the scraggly tree, a couple of sets of long underwear, socks, a new pair of rubber galoshes, a wool sweater that my mother (no seamstress) had knit with one sleeve longer than the other, and with the stripes not matching. I tried to swallow the knot of disappointment in my throat and register pleasure with the ragtail collection of little cars. I was as transparent as the front window.

After the bountiful breakfast of buckwheat cakes, syrup and farm-fresh sausage, I could hardly contain my impatience to visit my father’s house across town for mid-afternoon dinner--an arrangement worked out between my sister and my father since he and my mother hadn’t communicated since the divorce. At my father’s house, I knew, everything would be as it had always been on Christmas Day.

Except that it wasn’t my house any more. The tree was as big as ever (my father didn’t give up tradition without a fight), but he was wan and nervous and his new wife, younger and trimmer than my mother, was clearly ill at ease. I couldn’t shake the stricken look on my mother’s face as I had left for the rendezvous. Dinner was strained, punctuated with bursts of forced gaiety. The big, but cozy and familiar rooms in which I had grown up made me homesick for the way it had been before. I had no appetite and declined, to raised eyebrows, mincemeat pies.

The Depression had virtually eliminated “frill” Christmas presents and so there was more clothing--a store-brought sweater where the stripes did match, genuine wool (not cotton) socks, a “leatherette” jacket, a wool hat with ear flaps that tied under the chin. And, finally, the last gift resplendent in its Christmas wrappings and huge red bow. The shape was familiar and with trembling fingers I tore the wrappings from Chemcraft’s top-of-the-line chemistry set--the one that folded out from the front to form a real, free-standing, chemistry laboratory. I gasped and sank down on my knees in front of it, running my hands lovingly across the gleaming, genuine-oak case.

Later, and excitedly, I bundled up my gifts with a hammerlock on the chemistry set that would have bent steel and began wading through the drifting snow toward home, impatient to show off my prize to my mother. But then, as the angular and ugly old rented house came into view, my pace slowed. How shabby the Tootsie Toys would seem next to the magnificent chemistry set. How drab the home-made sweater would be next to the beautiful one from Indianapolis’ L. S. Ayres & Co. How inadequate the cotton socks would look. I could already see the fighting-back-tears look on my mother’s face to be upstaged by the man whose name had gone out of her vocabulary.

I literally slinked in the front door and into the living room where my mother and sister were listening to Christmas music on our Philco console radio.

“Hi!” My sister said with an attempt at lightness. “What did they give you?” My mother, inscrutable, was avoiding my eyes and studying the stumpy Christmas tree as if it held the secret of something.

I twisted around, half-shielding from them the armful of presents. “Jus’ some dumb old junk,” I said, gruffly, and dumped the clothing, still in their Christmas boxes, under the tree. I turned, hurriedly, with the chemistry set cradled in my arms and scurried for the dank basement.

“What else do you have there?”

“Jus’ a dumb old chemistry set,” I mumbled, and took refuge in the cellar. On a rough bench, under the basement’s sole, naked, light bulb, I spread out the chemistry set and rapturously watched the light dance on the polished wood. It was the most magnificent thing I had ever seen. And I was ashamed of it, and what it represented.

I don’t know how long she had been standing behind me. “It’s beautiful,” she said, softly, “but you’ll catch your death of cold playing with it down here.” She ran her hand through my hair. “Bring it upstairs, under the tree, where it belongs. It was given in love. We accept it the same way.”

How had my father known the one Christmas present for which I would have given my soul when even my mother didn’t know it?

It wasn’t until later that I discovered that the full-page Chemcraft advertisement from the Open Road for Boys, with the top-of-the-line model boldly encircled, was missing from my desk in the bedroom.

And that there had been one, final communication between the two people I loved, after all.