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  I was needed at the office, those last few weeks before Christmas, more than I had been since June, when I was first starting to learn to be a printer. As Father had said, he got the extra advertising, and there was extra job printing besides, Christmas cards, greetings, even personal stationery. I spent all my free time folding papers, cleaning presses, doing the extra chores at the office.

  But I knew that things were happening, things that meant Christmas, all over town. There was a feeling in the air that soon became a community sense of holiday. It didn’t have anything to do with buying and selling, either. There was Christmas business in the stores, of course, but there was this something-else, too. I suppose you would call it the Christmas spirit.

  In most towns this kind of thing usually starts with the churches. But Flagler’s principal church didn’t have any preacher. After the Gibbses left, the board of the Congregational church took quite a while to decide on a successor, and when one finally was named he couldn’t come until after the first of the year. The Congregational church actually was a community church that included practically everybody in town except a handful of Catholics and three or four families of Lutherans. The Lutherans had a tiny chapel in the north end of town, but the Catholics had no church at all; a priest came up from Burlington every few weeks to hold mass in someone’s house. Most of the children in town went to Sunday school at the Congregational church, and Sunday school was continued even without a preacher. Plans for a Christmas program actually started there.

  Then the Commercial Club, the business men’s organization, got around to Christmas at the first meeting after Thanksgiving. It started with talk about promoting the town and inviting the farmers to come in and “enjoy the Christmas spirit,” which meant spend their money in the Flagler stores. After a little of this claptrap Clarence Smith got up. He was a real estate man, an influential member of the school board, and a man with a strong sense of social responsibility. Some of the old-timers called him a Socialist because he said Flagler should have a municipal light plant and water system. He got up and said, in his rather mild way, “If we are talking about Christmas, gentlemen, I suggest that we forget about promoting Flagler and pulling the farmers into the stores and plan a Christmas program worthy of the occasion. I rather imagine that business will take care of itself, with no more than the usual attention we give it. But Christmas needs our help. Are you willing to give that help, or are you going to go on talking about your margin of profit?”

  There was considerable muttering, but finally someone moved that a Christmas Committee be named, with Clarence Smith as chairman, to do what was fit and proper in assisting with a community Christmas. There was no discussion, and the motion was about to come to a vote when Mr. Smith said, “Unless there is an appropriation, I see no point in naming a committee. I certainly don’t intend to go around and pass the hat.” More muttering. Then someone amended the motion to empower the committee to spend up to one hundred dollars. A voice asked, horrified, “That much?” And Chris Straub, who ran a lumber yard and also was superintendent of the Sunday school, said, “That’s not enough. That’s only about five dollars apiece. I’ll double that if the rest of you will. Let’s make it two hundred dollars!” There was a gasp, and there were muttered dissents; but nobody ever wants it said that he voted against Christmas. The amendment was passed unanimously, on the record at least, and then the original motion was passed the same way.

  That was the first week in December. Things began happening almost at once.

  It was announced that there would be a community Christmas program at the church, complete with tree and gifts for the youngsters and Santa Claus in person. The school, the Sunday school, and practically everyone in town was to have a part in it.

  Even before the tree came, decorations were planned and begun. The teacher of the primary grades in school came down to the News office to get material for paper chains. Father gave her a big package of colored manila strips, an inch wide and cut on the paper cutter. Several mothers made flour paste. From then till the Christmas holiday, the first-graders made paper chains, uneven and paste-smeared, but chains of love and belief. There must have been well over half a mile of those chains.

  Other youngsters made popcorn strings. Nobody knows how much popcorn was popped and scorched and sorted and strung, or how many small fingers were pricked sore with darning needles. But yards, rods, furlongs of popcorn strings were made. And cranberry strings. Mr. Hall ordered a full barrel of cranberries, gave half of them to the cranberry stringers, sold the other half to their mothers for holiday sauce.

  For the grownups to manage, there were the gifts. Dolls for the girls, tin whistles and rubber balls for the boys. How many there were, I have no idea, but they were wrapped individually in bright packages, and there were several bushels of them.

  There was the candy, hard candy, gum drops, stick candy, red and green and frosty white. It came in huge wooden buckets, and it was packed, so many pieces of each kind, in paper bags. Bushels of bags of candy.

  There were oranges. Oranges weren’t everyday fare, and canned or frozen orange juice hadn’t even been dreamed of. The oranges we had, on rare occasions, came from California and they had to be ordered special. Mr. Hall ordered them, ten or twelve crates, and they cost so much I am sure they were paid for out of the money appropriated to Mr. Smith’s committee. I know only one crate of them was put on sale. The rest were for the community Christmas.

  And, finally, there was the tree.

  I don’t know where the tree came from, but probably from up in the mountains beyond Denver. It was close to thirty feet high, and of course it was an evergreen, a spruce as I remember. Farther south, down in New Mexico and even in southern Colorado where there were a good many Mexican-Americans, they decorated cottonwoods for Christmas trees. They put cotton on them for snow and gave it glitter with flakes of mica. They hung them with birds and angels cut from tin cans, and they fastened their presents on those trees or put them down at the foot. But most of the people in and around Flagler came from the Midwest and wouldn’t have understood such customs. They wanted an evergreen tree. So that’s what they got.

  The tree wasn’t set up, of course, until the last week before Christmas, when school had let out for the holiday. Then it was taken into the church auditorium, put in place beside the pulpit, braced and wired and made as firm and safe as though it had grown there. It was so tall they had to take almost five feet off its top to make it clear the ceiling of the church.

  If there were any other Christmas trees in town, I didn’t know about them. I don’t think there was even one.

  Once it was up, the big tree had to be decorated. The paper chains were brought, and the popcorn strings, and the cranberry strings. The women supervised and the men and bigger boys climbed tall ladders to drape the decorations from the very topmost branch all the way down, twig by twig. And even before the decorations were all in place, the question of candles arose. There was always that question, whether it was a public tree or a private one, and when it was a public tree it was doubly important.

  Generally speaking, a Christmas tree had to have candles. That was finally agreed on. But were the candles to be lighted? That was the crucial question. Lighted candles meant open fire, and fire in any evergreen is dangerous. A Christmas tree afire in a crowded public building could become a horrible calamity. A tree fire at home was bad enough.

  It was agreed, though, that there should be candles, and they were put up, hundreds of them, red and green and white, four inches long, big around as a lead pencil, before the tall ladders were removed. Then came the question: Shall there be lighted candles? Some said, “We don’t go if the candles are lit!” Some said, “We won’t go if there aren’t lighted candles!” More wanted lighted candles than didn’t want them, but Mr. Smith, who assumed authority nobody else really wanted, achieved a compromise. Only those candles facing the pews and low enough to be lighted from the floor would be lit. And two men would be d
elegated to watch the candles and put out any fire the moment it started. They would sit in the front row, directly in front of the tree, and have pails of water at hand. There never had been a Christmas tree fire in a public building in Flagler and Mr. Smith wasn’t going to have one now. He was an insurance man as well as a real estate man, knew the hazards, and wasn’t going to let anything happen.

  Meanwhile, of course, the program itself was being rehearsed. Each of the Sunday school classes had a special number to prepare, recitations by groups and individuals were memorized, and two of the high school girls, one of them a Catholic, practiced solos. And Big Ed Schlote, the biggest man in town, over six feet and more than 220 pounds, was preparing for his special performance. Big Ed played the tuba in the town band, sang baritone in the choir, and had a laugh you could hear clear across town.

  Christmas fell on a Saturday that year, so the program would be held Friday evening. It was an almost perfect week, with light snow on Monday, then three days of clear, frosty air and sunshine, followed by another two inches of fresh snow Thursday night, as though to freshen the whole world and add a special Christmas sparkle. Friday was clear and dazzling, and there wasn’t enough snow on the ground to really interfere with travel, afoot, on horseback, or in buggy or wagon.

  It had been an easy week at the office after three weeks of fifteen-hour days. The rush was over. The paper that week was back to normal size, since there was no point in Christmas advertising in a paper that came out on December twenty-third.

  Mother went home in midafternoon, that Friday. There was no business to keep her at the office, and she said there was plenty to do at home. Father and I did the usual jobs of the day after publication day, breaking up the forms of ads, distributing the type in the news columns, cleaning the presses. And at a quarter of five, an hour earlier than usual, Father said, “Let’s wash up and call it a day.” Then he chuckled. “Call it a week, this time. Tomorrow’s Christmas, and the next day is Sunday.”

  We washed up and put on our coats, and Father reached for the big hanging lamp to turn it off. But, his hand on the lamp, he hesitated, looked around the office; and an odd smile came over his face. He shook his head slightly, as though not quite believing, before he turned out the light and we went out and he locked the door.

  Up on the street, it was already dark but there was the winter glow, the strange light from the snow as though it somehow had caught some fraction of the vanished daylight and held it. The air was crisp and I could see my own breath. It twinkled as we walked through a yellow beam of light from a window with an oil lamp on the table inside. Our footsteps whined slightly in the snow.

  We went home, and it seemed to me that the house was more full of warmth and comfort than I could remember. There was nothing special, really. Mother had supper almost ready, and she was setting the table when we went in. Father kissed her, as always, and hung up his coat, and I hung mine up, and he looked at the fire in the heating stove in the living room, started to poke at it, as always, and Mother called from the kitchen, “Leave that fire alone! I just got it fixed.” Father closed the stove door and put the poker down and muttered under his breath. He stood there, back to the stove, hands behind him, and he began to smile again, the same smile I had seen at the office. Mother was humming in the kitchen, her favorite carol, “Silent Night.” A few minutes later she called us to the table.

  We hadn’t more than served ourselves and taken two bites when she asked, “What are you up to, Will Borland?”

  Father looked at her, surprised. “Nothing. Why?”

  “I see that look on your face. If you’ve gone and bought an expensive present for me, you can just take it back and get your money.”

  “I didn’t do anything.”

  “Well, what’s that look on your face?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about, but I was thinking, down at the office, and since I got home, about how much better off we are than we have been any Christmas I can remember.”

  “We’re not out of debt.”

  “No. We owe money on the News. But that’s all we owe. What I was thinking about was—well, that Christmas when I was just out of the hospital.”

  “I remember.”

  “And the Christmas after that, and the next one, and last Christmas. Now I’m my own boss, and the paper’s making its own way, and—well, I think we’ve got a lot to be thankful for this Christmas. I have, I know that.”

  “I have too,” Mother said. “Now eat your supper so I can do the dishes. We’ve got to dress and be at the church by seven-thirty to get a seat.”

  Every star there was seemed to be out when we walked across town to the church. It was all lit up and you could see it from two blocks away, its lights gleaming through the windows onto the snow. There was talk and laughter from all directions, for people were coming from all over town. We joined a line going up the front steps four abreast, and when we got inside there weren’t more than twenty or thirty empty seats left in the pews. Men were carrying folding chairs up from the basement and setting them up in every vacant foot of space.

  The tree, down front, dominated everything. It was magnificent, loaded with paper chains, gleaming with popcorn strings, glowing with the bright red of cranberries. And all over it, from top to bottom, were the candles, bright flecks of color even without flame. At the foot of the tree were heaped the baskets of candy and gifts, covered with colored cloths and looking like mounds of mysterious wealth.

  People kept coming. By eight o’clock the church was jammed, every seat taken, every inch of standing room full. On the stage was the Knies orchestra, six pieces with William Knies, who ran the Beatrice cream station, as first violinist and leader. He pronounced the name “Kenn-ees,” accenting the second syllable, and he gave music lessons, had been trying to persuade Mother to let me learn some instrument. Promptly at eight o’clock Mr. Knies tapped his music stand and the orchestra played “Joy to the World!” The program had begun.

  The orchestra played three selections. Then Professor Conley, who had a good reading voice, went to the lectern, opened the Bible to the book of Luke, and began reading. “Now it came to pass in those days….” He read right on through the first twenty verses of the second chapter. “And the shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all the things that they had heard and seen, as it was told unto them.” He finished reading, and there was a hush as he left the lectern without a word more and returned to his seat.

  And then Chris Straub took over, as superintendent of the Sunday school. He said, “Now we will have our program,” and he waited there while Bill Kliewer and Ray Thompson lit the candles in reach on the front of the tree, then returned to their seats in the front row, handy to half a dozen buckets of water. Then Chris glanced at his notes and said, “Now I think the girls are going to sing ‘Holy Night’ for us.”

  A group of older girls went onto the platform, trying to suppress their giggles, and the pianist struck a chord and they sang “O Little Town of Bethlehem.” They returned to their seats and Chris said, “I guess the boys are the ones who are going to sing ‘Holy Night.’” A group of ten and twelve-year-old boys trooped up onto the stage, smirking, and they sang “Deck the Halls.” They left, and Chris said, “Well, confound it, we’re going to have ‘Holy Night’ one way or another. Everybody, please, sing ‘Holy Night.’” And he turned to the pianist, who nodded and struck the right chords, and everybody in the church stood up and sang that beautiful old song which seems to mean Christmas, all by itself.

  After that Chris had a schedule to read, and he summoned various ones to give their recitations—or sing their songs. Then one more carol was sung by everyone. By that time Chris Straub was getting fidgety. He kept watching the door at the back of the church. Just as the carol was ending there was the sound of sleigh bells outside. They jingled, then were quiet, then jingled again, and there was a motion at the outer door. The carol ended and Chris gestured toward the door and said in a stage whis
per that could be heard all over the church, “All right, Ed. Come on. Come on!”

  The sleigh bells jingled again, the door opened, and in came Big Ed Schlote, red-faced, red-suited, white-whiskered, beaming. He shook the string of bells and started down the aisle. There was a flutter through the room, then little cries of awe and delight from children in every corner. And before Big Ed got halfway down that aisle something happened. It wasn’t Ed Schlote in a red suit. It was Santa Claus. You could feel the wave of belief all over the church, in grownups as well as in the children.

  He came down the aisle and paused to look at that tree, with all its paper chains and its strings of popcorn and cranberries and all its candles. He looked and he said, “What a beautiful tree!” and his voice was awed. And everybody knew, in that moment, that it was the most beautiful Christmas tree in the world. Then he asked, “Where are Santa’s helpers?” and half a dozen men got from their seats and went down the aisle to his side. He said, “There are the presents,” and he held out both hands toward the heaped baskets under the tree. “There were so many I had to send them ahead. Take off the covers, please.” The men took off the cloths, revealing the heaped baskets of gifts. Then they lined up and each one took a basket and they went with him up the aisle. He singled out every child, called it by name, gave it a bag of candy, an orange and a toy. Slowly he made his way up the aisle, and across the back, and then down the other aisle, his helpers bringing fresh baskets as the loaded ones were emptied. It took forever, maybe an hour, but not once was there a break in that fantastic web of belief.