One night in the mid 1980s left me with an indelible, unexpected memory. It was Christmas Eve, and like nearly every Christmas Eve of my youth it was spent inside a brick bi-level on Vail just off of White Oak in Arlington Heights. My grandparents house was not fancy, and it was not large, but having moved there from Niles sometime around 1960 it was certainly a step in the right direction. On the night in question, I remember very little. I remember opening presents- never good ones, but presents anyway. I remember my grandfather at the head of his table, and the ceremony of food being passed from kitchen to dinette and around that table. I remember my grandfather telling jokes that I can’t remember, and I remember the curio cabinet full of shiny things that were never used.
But the memory is not of those things, it’s of the snowfall. While we were eating and unwrapping and complaining about what we unwrapped, it was silently snowing. That phenomenon of Christmas snow seems strange to me today as I sit and look outside my office window at Geneva Street, a street that looks more mid-November than it does late December. But it was snowing on that night, and I remember that by the time we were packed up and ready to leave it had snowed quite a bit. My uncle grabbed a shovel, the old kind with the metal blade, and I can still hear the sound of the metal scraping along the driveway as he worked back and forth to clear a path for our family station wagon. I can’t remember the presents or the food that night, but I can easily remember the sound of that shovel.
After a snow, the sky over a city is bright. The reflection from all those city lights gives life to an otherwise dark sky. It is not like this quite so much in the country. I remember the sky that night as we drove from the suburbs, coasting northwesterly up Highway 12. I fell asleep somewhere between Lake Zurich and Richmond and woke up when the car pulled left onto Upper Loch Vista, as I always did. Once inside, my mother would hurry us off to bed, and she’d stay awake deep into the night, dutifully preparing for the explosion of consumerism that would occur the following morning. The sound of her working in the small kitchen at the bottom of the stairs as I drifted off to sleep was always comforting.
This Holiday season, please do remember who is indeed the reason for the season. And know that it likely won’t be the gifts or the parties or the roast beast that your kids will remember many years from now. If they’re anything like me, they’ll remember the sound of a shovel on an asphalt driveway, and that memory will be enough. Merry Christmas and Happy Hanukkah.