Although we moved out when I was 14, I think of the house at 268 E. Walnut Street in Oneida as the house I grew up in. It is the place that holds safe almost all of my good childhood memories, especially memories of my mother's Christmas magic.
When I lived there with my family, the house was a duplex, and for most of the years we lived there, my cousins lived on the other side, just a wall away. I was told that the house began life as a mill of some sort on the banks of Oneida Creek, which is actually a small river that runs from the Town of Smithfield to the southeastern corner of Oneida Lake near South Bay. When the mill closed, someone had the building moved up from the creek to Walnut Street, where it stayed until it was demolished in the summer of 2018 as part of the FEMA buyout after the 2013 flood. I can't find any historical proof of the mill or the house move, but this is the legend I was given as a child.
In my memory, the two front rooms of the house were big, wide spaces. The front door opened into what we called the playroom, facing the stairway, which was lined with a pretty wooden banister. The playroom connected to the living room with not so much a doorway as an opening the rooms' width, marked by floor to ceiling wooden columns. It was a right turn into the dining room from the living room; again, no doorway, just a wide opening. There were bookcases, shelves, and many other surfaces in those spaces that were just waiting for my mother's holiday touch.
Gentle Reader, you are perhaps wondering why my mind went sliding down this memory hill today. The journey was prompted by the simple act of using scotch tape to hang the greeting cards we have received this season around the doorway between the living room and the kitchen/dining room. That was one of the more simple magics my mother did to turn our home into a winter wonderland. As a child, I loved the variety of texture, color, and shape, and I still do. Mom would save the cards from year to year and use them as Christmas craft fun for kids.
Every year my mother filled those rooms with the kind of Christmas magic that fills every heart with joy, and especially the giant hearts that dwell in little children. Those wooden columns were wrapped to look like candy canes, and the banister on the stairs was covered with garland and other decorations.
She would string gold garland throughout the rooms, and at night it would shimmer and sparkle as it caught the light from a dozen different sources. Every flat surface was filled with decorations; one of my favorites was the red velvet sleigh with velvet reindeer. There were angels and lanterns, tiny trees and winter-themed animals, and beautiful glassware pieces.
Mom also loved musical decorations, and I remember the jingle bell-shaped wall hanging that played Jingle Bells when you pulled the string, which we were only allowed to do with her permission. She would also hang a series of winter and holiday windchimes, and the air coming from the forced air furnace was enough to set them in motion. When my own children were tiny, she gave me my favorite of the windchimes, a little elf sitting in a birdhouse. Long before the days of elf on a shelf, I believed this little guy flew to the North Pole to report to Santa every night.
Balancing the prettiness of the store-bought decorations were the often homely art-class efforts of my mother's seven children. She would hang these on the walls or tape them to the cabinet doors. Santa masks, decorated trees, handprints meant to be one thing or another - most were hideous, and she loved every single one of them.
She also filled our home with Christmas music, playing her albums and 8-track tapes from the playroom's console stereo. Elvis, Frank Sinatra, Burl Ives, the Andrews Sisters, Brenda Lee, and Andy Williams were my first-holiday music loves. I especially loved to listen to them at night, when mom would let me turn the lights off and crawl under the tree so I could stare up through the branches at the lights.
Merry Christmas on the other side, Mom. In my heart, I am always home, with you, at this time of year.
