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Little Old Canarsie At Christmas
In those days we only started to look for Christmas right after Thanksgiving and we enjoyed waiting for it to come. Mom took us kids down to Broadway, Brooklyn to do her shopping and what a thrill it was to walk along Broadway and see all the stores decorated with all kinds of Christmas ornaments and toys. At this time Broadway had many beautiful stores and theatres. We started at Gates Avenue and walked all the way down to Flushing Avenue. We started in Woolworth’s and then down to the Berlin Store and finally we reached another Woolworth Store, then the big store of H. Batterman with its great big famous clock outside on the sidewalk. This clock was often referred to by gamblers and working men. They’d say: “What am I working (or playing) for, Batterman’s Clock?” When we were home about four days before the big day to come we loved to watch Mom getting her pumpkins ready and also lemon and then a mixture of chocolate and vanilla to make about a dozen pumpkin and a couple of lemon pies and big homemade chocolate cake. We kids couldn’t wait until she was done so we could scrape out the pans of chocolate and vanilla which tasted so good. These pies were put in the front room of the house, which was like a butcher’s icebox when you opened the door. We lived these days mostly in the kitchen, as we didn’t have steam heat and most homes had very large kitchens with a big coal range for cooking and heating, and the whole family stayed in them to play Dominoes or Casino, sometimes with a couple of visiting neighbors. How we hated to go upstairs to bed on Christmas Eve, as next day was the big day when we came downstairs to see if Santa Claus came! Pop opened the front room door and our eyes came popping out of our heads at all the beautiful toys he had left us, and Pop told us he had to help Santa down the chimney and told him not to put pepper in any of our eyes since we hadn’t stayed awake to do any peeking. We had the tree up these days until almost Easter, as it kept good in the cold room. Many times we got caught by Mom when we sneaked in to get a French cream or a string of pink and white popcorn, which was wrapped in fancy paper of strings on thread to decorate the tree. By the time the tree was taken down we kids had it pretty well stripped, except for the glass ornaments on it. In these day we went to Grace M.P. Church and I think pastor Henry Hull was minister or Rev. Charles Ackley. The church had a Christmas party and all of us were given a box of hard candies by Santa (the well known lawyer who in later years became a Supreme Court Judge, William R. Wilson), but we suspected it might be Donald Dunnet as he was one of the choir singers in the church and had a lovely voice. We enjoyed those days with some of the boys we grew up with; Mervin and Frank Phillips, Frank Carman, Roy Rowland, Abe Timson, George Jelley, Ber Fisher, Bernie Hampson, Fred Wanser, Alonzo Gibbs, Frank Gladwish, Rober and Edward Mat-thews, Dan Miller and Charles and Russell Ryder, and the Ryder boys down Church Lane-George, Will and Sam, Milton Ford, Puggy Deiner and many more I just can’t recall. Most of our homes were lighted up by kerosene lamps and we had no house decorations at Christmas time except the lighted candles on the trees. We sure enjoyed those days and 9 o’clock was our time to be in the house unless it was a special occasion. So ends another chapter of the days of long ago, in good “Little Old Can-arsie”.
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