All Aglow in Lights
Grandma’s Birthday Was the Final Hurrah
Little Christmas, also known as Epiphany, was nearly as special as Christmas when I was growing up in the 1940s in Iron River, Michigan. On Jan. 6, all my relatives got together to celebrate my grandmother’s birthday and take down her Christmas tree. Sometimes my aunts, uncles and cousins from as far as Marquette, Michigan (almost 90 miles away), would come for a visit.
We cousins were allowed to carefully remove the special ornaments from the tree. I remember them well, especially two wooden Easter eggs given to Grandma by a neighbor girl who went to college—a big deal in our small town. Grandma tied ribbons around them and turned them into ornaments.
The ornaments were carefully wrapped in tissue paper and packed in a box that was stored behind a curtain in Grandma’s closet until the week before Christmas the following year. In those days, we never put up decorations any earlier than a week before Christmas. It just wasn’t right.
Some years I helped Grandma make paper chains from construction paper to decorate the tree (those we threw away). Once, we made popcorn-and-cranberry chains, but we didn’t try that again because it was too hard to run the needle and thread through the popcorn without breaking it and pricking our fingers.
Taking Grandma’s special sugar cookies off the tree was the best part of the event. By early January the cookies were pretty stale, but to us kids they were still delicious. We felt very grown up eating cookies and drinking coffee with the adults. Of course, our coffee was diluted with canned milk and sugar.
Uncle John also bought a special birthday cake at the A&P store. Grandma couldn’t be expected to bake her own birthday cake.
We sat in her living room, turned on the tree lights and basked in their glow one last time, enjoying the stale Christmas cookies, storebought birthday cake and coffee.
The final step was to remove the lights from the tree. It was always a little sad being tucked into bed that night, knowing it wouldn’t be Christmas again for another whole year.
But that wasn’t the end. The next morning my uncles hauled Grandma’s tree outdoors, where my older cousins and their friends placed it on the hill in front of our house and covered it with snow. Their makeshift ski jump lasted until about March, when spring sunshine finally melted the last of the snow.