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| Thomas New & Louisa (Clayton) New c 1940s, East Finchley, London |
Throughout my childhood, our English Christmases became more and more Americanised as the 10-day Atlantic Ocean voyage drifted into history. We always had a live naturally scented fir tree decorated with a few simple ornaments, which dad brought from those first Christmases before World War II. My mum baked a traditional English Christmas cake surrounded by a colourful band, covered with a snowscape of Royal icing with Father Christmas, reindeer, and miniature fir trees.
Outside, the townsfolk of Vineland, New Jersey welcomed
Father Christmas with red and green lights hung across the broad avenue. On
Christmas Eve, we joined bundled church folk singing carols and collecting
coins for the poor in honour of Tiny Tim. And at church on the Sunday before
Christmas, we were sure to get a colourful two-layer box of filled chocolates.
Dad always got my dark ones.
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| Christmas Season 1950s Vineland NJ |
On that glorious morning, I would wake to discover a traditional red stocking filled with fruit and sweets that magically appeared on my bed. In the next scene, I’m on the floor looking at all the presents beneath the tree. Father Christmas came though we had no chimney—only a large oil-fed heater below a brown metal grate in the sitting room. Questions of world travel and chimneys wouldn’t produce doubts for a year or two as I opened one package or another from the jolly elf. And there were always fancy boxes from London with toys made in Hong Kong, books and comics not seen by American friends, and my favourite English chocolates.
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| Christmas c 1961 |
Later, when I was ten, I opened a special present on Christmas morning. Inside the cover of this small Oxford Bible, I read: “with fondest love from, Nana, Grandad xxx.” I added the year—it was Sunday 1960. Perhaps I took my new Bible to church—we would never miss a Sunday morning service. I never separated from this parting gift, which she made sacred despite the edges now trimmed with electric tape.
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| Nana's last gift 1960 |
Next year on 5 December, I was sitting in sixth grade when the teacher called me away from my desk. It was a strange thing to see Dad in the middle of the day. He must have told me the news on the way to our grey 1949 Plymouth. Mum was crying. Her mum had died. I wouldn’t see Nana New again.
We lived in a cold small two-bedroom rectangle suspended
above swampland in East Vineland, New Jersey. Dad had left his office job on
Baker’s Street in London and found work loading grey concrete blocks on nondescript
lorries in the promised land. It wasn’t the sort of job that left him with
spare change. In this context, Rev. Fred Packer made it possible for us to fly
home. I was amazed at seeing the $100 bills he gave to my dad. It was a loan of
course, but how magnanimous!
Adults find ways to help children enjoy difficult times. In
those days, flying was an adventure. We boarded a blue and white Pan Am jet in
New York for our first-ever transatlantic flight. I got Pan Am wings and dad
got beer spilled on his grey suit, which offered a decidedly unsanctified odour
and called for explanations and laughter amidst the mourning. Soon we were
winding our way through the bleak wintry streets of old London, which Dickens
would have recognised by the smell of coal fires and the damp cold feel of
walking through dense fogs that left flecks of black soot on my new
cream-coloured coat.
As the days went by, I was hugged and kissed by my smiling nicknamed
relatives and friends who revelled in memories before the war. Nana Sutton,
aunts and uncles—they’re all gone now.
Perhaps dad knew one of us needed a break? We walked along
the Thames, visited old Finchley haunts, jumped on red double-deckers like grandad
Sutton once drove, and went here and there through the underground labyrinth on
roaring trains. One afternoon poor old grandad Thomas New reached in his pocket
to give me a parting gift of 12 old English pennies surely worth more in weight
than you could buy with a shilling. And then he gave me the gift of words, a
miniature green dictionary. I didn’t know then how precious it must have been
because he only had three years of school before working in the brickfields.
That was grandad’s last gift.
Two years later, as a part of our growing American Christmas
traditions, dad took me the 40 miles across the Delaware to Philadelphia where
fabulous old stores like John Wanamaker and Gimbels entertained families with
lavish animated displays. It was a 1950s American Christmas wonderland. And
there I got my favourite novel, A Christmas Carol, where I could connect
year after year with ghostly stories that flit from scene to scene showing me
joyful family gatherings, chestnuts roasting at Christmas markets, and frightful
images of ancient markers in a London cemetery.
Like the stories in Nana and Grandad’s Bible, Dickens did
not leave me with clanging chains of sadness past but threw open the windows on
another day inviting all of us to honour those who went before by investing in the
possible future lives running to and fro.
In the eternal words of Tiny Tim,
“God Bess Us, Every One!”
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