Christmas snapshots

Like many people, I have a large collection of photographs, accumulated over many years from various sources, many of them dating back to my childhood and beyond. Until three or four years ago, most of them lay in bags or boxes in various places around the house until one fateful day I decided that the time had come to finally organise them in some way or other. There followed days and nights of sifting and sorting before I finally completed a number of photo albums and satisfied myself that justice had been done to the family archives!

Now on the mantelpiece of my little study stand two particular photographs that came to light during that Herculean operation. The first is a relatively small colour photograph showing a man in his Sunday best, sitting in an armchair by the fire; his spectacles perched precariously on the end of his nose and reading a book. By his side on a higher chair looking towards the camera sits his wife, also nicely dressed, a smile on her face and a newspaper open before her on the sitting-room table.

The two people in that photograph are, of course, my mother and father, and it was taken 58 years ago this Christmas. Yes, it was Christmas 1964 and my excitement knew no bounds for, like any seven-year-old, I was looking forward to Santa’s arrival, and whatever presents he might bring.

Yet more important even than Santa, was the coming of my sister Mary, home on a visit from America. My younger brother Michael and I had heard so much about Chicago and all it entailed, that to us it had long since assumed the same hallowed status as the North Pole itself, as far as magic and mystery went. It had been a bitter heartbreak for my mother when her only daughter, Mary, had emigrated to America two years before, but now she was home, and we had a real yank in the family!

For us, it was her camera more than anything else that marked her out as someone who was now different from all the other people in our town. No sooner would a neighbour or a visitor enter the house than their picture would have to be taken by my sister. It was not that people didn’t have their own cameras at the time but rather that this camera was something special. It was that most wonderful thing - a full-colour automatic camera!

I don’t recall exactly how long she stayed with us that Christmas, but when she returned to Chicago my sister left behind a pictorial record of that time that to this very day informs the way I think about Christmas.

From time to time, and especially at Christmas, I take out those tiny photographs to look again at the house where I was reared, long since vanished, my mother and father, both gone for over 30 years, and two little boys, newly attired in their cowboy suits and proudly displaying their cap guns and cowboy hats. Oh yes, Santa was very good that year. In the town square they stand, smiling and innocent, with the snow all around them. Did I mention we had a white Christmas that year?

In another photo, under the Christmas tree, is the crib my father had bought so many years before in the early fifties; before which we knelt each night, and which remains our family crib to this day. Every year as I prepare to put up that crib, I reverently take out those same figures, some of them still wrapped in the Sunday paper of Christmas 1964, the same paper perhaps, that my mother is reading in that famous picture taken by my sister on that special Christmas day.

It was 30 years later before we had the next white Christmas. I went out to the front gate by the roadway and took a photograph of my own two children in the snow. Ironically enough it was a black-and-white photo. It stands today on the same mantelpiece as the one taken 30 years before. Another Christmas… another world maybe, yet a treasured link in the chain of life and one which never fails to give me comfort when I travel down the path of memories past.