Not long after the end of World War II, my parents, my three siblings, and I returned to Baltimore, our hometown. My father had been discharged from the Public Health Service, the medical unit of the army. We left our wonderful house on Clay Street in San Francisco and moved back across the country into our faux-Tudor home at 3308 West North Avenue to resume our life there. That move resurrected our family’s Christmas celebration. 

We were so excited that year, 1947. During the war we had moved around the country, and now we were home again, able to return to the Christmas celebrations of our larger family — my grandparents, uncles, aunts, and cousins.

My father drove us to where Christmas trees were being sold, and the three of us quarreled about which to choose — long needle or short needle. My mother settled the argument, and we brought our tree home, tied to the top of our Studebaker. We screwed it into a stand and filled the stand with water. Then we brought out the Christmas balls and lights that had been stored in a big cardboard box in the basement.

Going through the lights was laborious. The strings were wired in series, and none worked if even one bulb was burned out. It was necessary to test every bulb to find the one or two that no longer worked.

Starting in the afternoon of Christmas Eve, we decorated the tree.

Everything outside the house seemed as exciting as our living room. Cars passed slowly through the snow. Across the street, in Gwynns Falls Park, a giant tree had been decorated with lights and was guarded by a police officer in uniform and a long blue coat. We didn’t understand why that was necessary in our neighborhood — and it probably wasn’t. This was the mid-forties, just after the war, and everyone seemed united and euphoric.

Winters were very cold in Baltimore then. My sister, my brother, and I looked out the living-room window while we trimmed the tree, wrapped presents, and talked. We saw the police officer dancing up and down across the deserted street to keep warm. We put on our coats, crossed the street, and invited him into our house for a glass of eggnog or some other warming drink.

Once inside, the three of us — my brother Michael was only two years old—persuaded the officer to show us his gun. He emptied it of bullets and gave it to us to play cops and robbers.

I remember how frightened my mother was, watching us play with a real gun.

I was too young then to understand that Jewish families didn’t celebrate Christmas. Later, when I was in junior high school in the early 1950s, I began to understand that Jews skipped the Christmas holidays. I think it dawned on me when my Jewish friends missed school for Passover, Rosh Hashanah, and Yom Kippur. That confused me. We didn’t belong to a synagogue and never had. Why did Jews celebrate holidays we didn’t celebrate? And why did we celebrate Christmas when Jews didn’t?

We loved Christmas. I felt sorry for my friends. They showed me the little dreidels they received for Hanukkah. I didn’t tell them about the gifts we received. My grandfather was a big-time Jew. He was president of the American Jewish Congress and traveled by train once or twice a month to work with Jewish philanthropic organizations. Before World War II, he had sponsored many Jewish families fleeing Germany during the rise of Nazi persecution.

He was unquestionably Jewish. As a boy, he had belonged to a synagogue and had even taught Sunday school. And yet, we didn’t celebrate Jewish holidays or belong to a synagogue. Instead, our family celebrated Christmas — with gifts, a holiday feast, and a huge, decorated tree.

It wasn’t until my teenage years that I noticed my grandparents didn’t put a wreath on their front door or a star on top of their tree.

My friends didn’t understand why we celebrated Christmas. I told them it was a great holiday. I told them about trimming the tree, the food, the carols, the presents. They shrugged in bewilderment, and I felt sorry for them.

Many of my friends were sons of Jewish immigrants. We were immigrants too, but their families had arrived in Baltimore between the two world wars. They didn’t know or socialize with the Jews who had arrived before and after the Civil War — when my mother’s family came to Baltimore.

That first wave of Jewish immigrants wanted to belong. What they wanted to belong to was America. So they extinguished their interest in Hanukkah, a minor holiday anyway, and embraced Christmas, a deeply American one. It wasn’t Jewishness they were renouncing —though that was true for some.

Christmas was ritualized in our family. We could predict the entire day. It unfolded exactly the same way every year.

We rose early and waited impatiently while our parents drank their coffee. Under the tree was a giant pile of gifts – some wrapped, some wrapped carelessly, and some wrapped with great care and decorated string and ribbons. On a small table next to the tree was a loaf of stollen sitting on a long china platter.

I was obsessive about those gifts. I made a list of all thirty people who would be at my grandparents’ home and tried carefully to choose the right present for each. I stayed up into the early hours of Christmas morning, listening to Bing Crosby singing Carols on the radio as I wrapped each gift, folding and tucking the paper tightly, and stretching it just enough so the Scotch tape could be applied perfectly.

I could barely get out of bed on Christmas morning, I was so tired.

Gift-giving at our house began at eight and ended at eleven, when we dressed to go to my grandparents’ home for the next round. At our house we could wear pajamas. At my grandparents’, we were expected to be dignified.

We arrived shouting — no one outside our nuclear family ever shouted — and were received somberly. My grandfather, sitting in his chair and smoking a large cigar, sometimes shushed us with a stern glance. Sometimes, as his hearing failed, he would shout a single name — usually my sister Carla’s.

She hated that.

Coffee was served at the dining-room table while we children waited in the music room. The adults gathered around the table, where a huge red Christmas stocking hung with the head of a smoked eel peering out from the top.

My grandmother reached around the eel and removed small envelopes. Inside each was a poem written by a family member — usually humorous, recounting events from the past year.

One year, for example, when I was having a small romance with a student at Mount Holyoke College, my grandmother handed me a card to read:

Holy smoke. What a joke:
Mark’s enrolled in Holyoke.

After the poems, we moved into the music room, named for the grand piano and a beautiful radio that sat in the corner.

It was one of only two rooms large enough to hold the entire family. There my grandfather stood for three hours, bending to retrieve gifts from the formidable pile beneath the tree — topped with a small sled carrying a tiny Santa (no star) — and handing them out one by one so that every gift could be appreciated.

It was exhausting, especially for him.

Afterward, we retreated to the living room for drinks while we waited for Bobalie to call us to dinner. Then we sat at two tables and were served goose and sauerkraut, mashed potatoes, corn and tomatoes, spinach and mushrooms, and finally Christmas pudding, ignited with brandy and served with hard sauce made with brandy and rum.

Now, more than three-quarters of a century later, this is what I think about when I think about Christmas. The late nights. The obsessive wrapping. My father handing out gifts under our tree. My grandfather doing the same under his. My uncle Edward, so uncomfortable with his family, whistling Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony while he spoke to me.

These are treasured memories.

This year I will spend Christmas Eve alone. I will listen not to Bing Crosby, but to Handel’s Messiah, as I have done since my musical career. And as I decide what celebration food I can prepare for my solitary Christmas Day, I think this:

Christmas was a dreamworld for me. Its reality has faded into wonderful memories.

My siblings live in Philadelphia and Boston. Carla, the only one who lived in Washington, has died. My sons live elsewhere — and even if they didn’t, they would want to make their own Christmas memories. In any case, no matter what, it would have been impossible to retain the magic of my childhood Christmases: the poems, the tree, the gifts, the dining.

For me now, the magic of Christmas exists only in memory.

And that is the best I can do.