REMEMBERING CHAUNCEY STREET 9.Holidays by Patricia Jones [Pat Aronica]

Sitting on our front porch, wearing my Easter corsage c. 1947.
(From left to right: Cousin Leila, me, Freddy, and Cousin Mary.)

The holidays were wonderful! Every Easter my father would get us girls a corsage and a box of Loft’s chocolates. There were always colored, hard-cooked eggs, chocolates for the boys, and jelly beans of course. There was a bunch of daffodils, purchased on the way home from Mass, for my mother.

My father always managed to make a little overtime just before Easter, so somehow there might be a new pair of shoes or even a new outfit. I especially remember a suit that my sister, Mary, made for me while she was in junior high school, P.S. 73. It was a hunter-green gabardine with a pleated skirt and an Eisenhower-style jacket. Another year she made a jacket out of grey flannel with a dark blue bow at the neck.

Me and our Christmas tree draped in tinsel c. 1952.
(This was a black and white photo that I hand-painted.)

Christmas was always magical. Our front room was the last room to get heat. That was where we put up the Christmas tree every Christmas Eve. It was where I slept on the two chairs and later on the couch. My father would string the lights on the tree, and my brothers and sisters and I would decorate with ornaments and tinsel. Tinsel was a silver-colored string approximately twelve inches long. We folded it over the branches of the tree. It would catch the colored glow of the lights and shine like icicles.

Gifts were placed unwrapped under the tree by my parents. Somehow, we knew which gift belonged to which child. I never thought that was a miracle in itself though.

The day after Christmas our tree was dismantled and thrown out, as my mother had such a fear of fires. Many a tenement was lost to a blazing tree fire. It happened every year, and Mom was not going to take any chances.

One Mother’s Day, my father gave my sisters, Mary and Dotsy, two dollars to get my mother some stockings. We had a John’s Bargain Store on Broadway Ave. They had a sale: six pairs of stockings for a dollar. Well, that year for Mother’s Day, Mom got six pairs of stockings and a box of smelly talcum powder.

© 2013, Patricia Jones