Notes from my Knapsack 12-21-18

Notes from my Knapsack 12-21-18

Jeff Gill

 

Where things used to be

___

 

My own Christmas memories circle around family scenes and church events, with the usual overlay of retail dreams and commercial fantasy.

 

I grew up outside of Chicago, and a trip to see the windows at Marshall Fields followed by lunch in the Walnut Room was a necessary part of the holiday. There had to be a dessert made from a scoop of ice cream, a marshmallow, and strategically placed licorice making a snowman in a top hat, matching Uncle Mistletoe flying around near the top of the giant tree in the center of the multi-story room.

 

Fields' is now Macy's, but the Walnut Room is still there. Uncle Mistletoe is in a display case nearby, for nostalgic former kids like me.

 

In college when I started Christmas shopping for myself with money I'd earned on my own, I created some memories of shopping and the season in marvelous little shops all of which are gone now. Odd stairs leading nowhere, shelves to the ceiling and cabinets here and there, and lighting casting both shadows and golden circles, far from the bright fluorescence now the norm. Once married, Joyce and I would travel to places during the Christmas to New Year's holiday break that are no longer there, but are oh so vivid in my mind; we had a child a couple of decades ago and took him places where we can't go back to now. Only the annual pictures of a growing child in multiple Santa's laps remain.

 

And now we've been in Granville long enough there are a collection of "what used to be's" in our thoughts and dimly visible, half-erased, on our mental maps. Some, oddly, we never knew, but though we didn't come to the area until 1989, the fire of the Opera House in 1982 is vivid in a false memory, colored in by pictures and artifacts in places like Elm's Pizza.

 

In fact, at Elm's there's still a jukebox in my mind, sitting right where a table is now, but it still is part of our family memories about the village and how we left and came back again. (Long story.) Hud's Chevrolet is likewise a mirage in our memory, but the souvenirs of that Williams family history make it a "used to be" for us as Granville residents in 2018. Blackstone's Grocery was a pub before we got here, but between Aline and Tim I catch a hint of it, even as I walk past the Broadway Pub today; Buck Sergeant I barely knew, but the stories about his shop are not hard to find even still.

 

I catch myself thinking about getting a card or candle at Crosswalk Gifts; as much as I like to tell people to visit Reader's Garden, my mind goes back downstairs again and again across the street to the Granville Times Book Cellar. Hare Hollow and Victoria's Parlor were no secret, well before Les Wexner started putting up white fences in New Albany (which had a grain elevator and feed store downtown I used to stop at, before Rt. 161 became a highway).

So much of Christmas is "used to be," whether it's Grandma's house or a store long gone and forgotten by most. The Hadden Sundblom 1930s & 40s Santa Claus, which did as much for our image of the jolly old elf as Thomas Nast an era before, liked to fiddle with hand cranked phones and old wooden toys as plastic and aluminum were taking over our visual vocabulary. Santa and the holiday season are soaked in nostalgia, however far back you go.

 

Likewise our village observances of Christmas and New Year and all the little remembrances of what was, mingling with how it is now, and what it might yet become.

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and pastor in Licking County; tell him about your memories of what's not there anymore at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.