Finding a tradition inside of a tradition
Every so often, I Google the names of my grandparents. The internet keeps expanding backward as more pre-internet information is digitized so it’s interesting to see if anything else has surfaced.
I wasn’t lucky enough to spend much of my adult life with them or wise enough to spend more of time with them when I could. Swimming through the internet allows me occasional glimpses of slices of their lives, from Census records documenting their existences to tiny vignettes that emerge solely through the twin coincidences of having at one point been documented and that documentation being digitized.
A few months ago, for example, I did a search for my grandfather, Elwood Glass. In the past, I’ve uncovered his name in advertisements related to his work recruiting employees at Sohio or as a member of the American Chemical Society. Did you know that local newspapers used to document people coming to town for visits? Well, they did.
My most recent search, though, uncovered something different: a mention from a 1979 Cornell University alumi magazine. Both he and my grandmother attended Cornell, graduating in 1938. And 41 years later, their classmates were treated to an unusual update on their lives.
A lovely family tradition is that of Flora (Daniel) and Elwood Glass ’38, described in a recent issue of Woman’s Day magazine. Each year, for more than 30 years, they have saved their Christmas tree, cut the trunk in small pieces, and written the year in pencil on the cut ends. On Christmas Eve, the family (five grown children and—at last report—six grandchildren) gathers in front of the fire and throws into it a piece from each year’s tree.
Each child puts on a piece from his birth year and those from special years such as college graduation, marriage, etc, and now the grandchildren put on a piece from their birth years as well. The children who celebrate Christmas in their own homes have also started this beautiful custom.
What struck me about this update wasn’t that it offered some new information about an interesting part of their lives. What struck me, instead, was that this is a tradition in which I still participate.
In my garage, I have ten chunks of wood, each a segment of a Christmas tree from each year of the past decade. When I’m taking our tree down after Christmas, I cut about eight inches off of the trunk, adding it to the collection. By the following Christmas Eve, it is seasoned and dry, so I write the year on the base with a marker — and then cut a slice off of it and each of its predecessors.
The night before Christmas is one of the few days each year on which we use our fireplace. I start a fire and my wife and (admittedly reluctant) kids sit around it. I have a file on my laptop that records the events of the years that correspond to each piece of wood — itself a modern update to the heavily scrawled upon piece of paper my grandfather used to use — and I read out what happened in that year. Or, at least, what we thought was important to include; the ceremony (such as it is) ends with our figuring out what events of the current year should be included on the list.
As the Cornell alumni magazine suggests, someone is picked to toss the piece of wood from each year into the fire. New jobs, the kids’ birth years, etc., are reserved for the person for whom the year was the most meaningful.
When we would do this at my grandparents’ house as a kid, there were decades worth of logs (or, in some cases, small slivers of wood) and often more than a dozen people vying for the title of most significant year. At our house these days, the lucky person is generally whichever of my kids wants to throw it in, since a lot of what’s documented occurred before they were born. But that’s the point: It’s a way of documenting and sharing family history that they otherwise don’t know.
Which brings me to the other interesting part of that 1979 update about my parents: That at some point in that time period, this family tradition had earned a write up in a national magazine.
My quiet hope was that this mention would turn out to have been some multipage spread, one in which a photographer from Woman’s Day came to my grandparents’ house in Cleveland Heights and took pictures of the process. I remember certain parts of that house distinctly: the green, high-pile carpet and yellow chairs in the living room; the pervasive, slightly acrid smell; the low-ceilinged attic stairs with the bookshelf of kids books on the landing. To be able to see a photo of that space, much less of my grandfather’s list (where did that end up?) would be remarkable.
But this meant tracking the article down. It meant, most likely, another attempt to see how much of the past the internet has already absorbed.
I was hampered by the vagueness of the reference. The alumni magazine was dated February 1979, suggesting that the Woman’s Day issue was probably during the preceding holiday season. At that point, the magazine came out monthly, and I tracked down the November 1978 and January 1979 relatively easily. The latter cost me $5 to access a downloadable PDF — a gamble, since it was unlikely that the magazine would be presenting Christmas tips in January (much less that the alumni magazine worked on such a relatively quick turnaround schedule). And, sure enough, the mention of my grandparents was in neither.
The most likely issue, of course, was the December issue, but I was having trouble locating a digital version of it. There was one accessible through Proquest, a clearinghouse of old periodicals that I could access from the New York City Public Library, but that meant carving out time to head into the city to do so. I set the project aside for a few weeks.
As it turns out, though, no such trip was necessary. Picking the idea back up earlier this month, I remembered that the NYPL allows people outside of the city to get library cards. I did so, allowing me to log into Proquest remotely.
The story about the fireplace logs wasn’t in the December 1978 issue. It was in the December 1977 one, featured in a section of household tips called “Neighbors” just across from a cigarette ad.
MEMORY TREES
Each year for over thirty years we have saved our Christmas tree, and after winter-mulching perennial plants and small shrubs with the lopped-off branches, my husband has cut the trunk into small pieces, each with the year written in pencil on the cut end. Then every Christmas Eve we gather in front of the fire and throw into it a piece from each year’s tree for all those thirty-odd successive years, remembering as we do so the major events of the year. Each child—now grown, of course—puts on the piece from his birth year (as the grandchildren are beginning to do too) as well as from years that held special events for him-college graduation, marriage and such. Thus each Christmas Eve becomes a time filled with happy memories of all the years we have lived in this house. Now the children who have Christmas in their own homes are starting the same custom for their children, and last year when for the first time we spent Christmas with a child’s family, they gave us part of their tree to take home and add to our collection so we could have an unbroken sequence.
Flora D. Glass, Cleveland Heights, Ohio
No photo of the family or of my grandparents’ house, but still a wonderful window into their lives. It’s very fitting that my grandmother would go into unnecessary detail about the handling of the old tree; she was an avid and careful gardener. Just reading the brief description allows me to visualize crowding around their fireplace on that green carpet, my mother, sister and me debating my cousins and their families about who deserved to throw in a particular sliver of log.
I would love to know how this came about. Not only the tradition, the origins of which are murky to me. (Was it something my grandparents themselves had inherited? Or was it something they invented, like saying “Asciugamani!” when toasting — Italian for “hand towel”?) But why did my grandmother send this in? Was she reading Woman’s Day when she spotted a call for family traditions? Perhaps she sat down to type it up at a typewriter in the small office at the top of the stairs — a room that I remember as being off-limits to the grandkids but that we lingered around anyway to review the framed family tree that hung on the wall just outside of it. I remember her and my grandfather as being fairly reserved, but this was obviously a notable enough achievement that it warranted sharing with the other alumni of Cornell University.
Holding the magazine in my hands, I had another thought, one that I’ve had often before: What would my grandparents think of me? What would they have said to me? What might they have told their friends? This is an under-appreciated part of what happens when we lose loved ones: We not only lose them but we lose the bond between them and us. We’re left imagining what present-day interactions might have been like — a longing that’s being exploited by those AI-grandparent apps.
This is a large part of why I was Googling my grandparents in the first place. It’s an effort to add onto the piecemeal memories I have of them with whatever other information exists out there. It’s an attempt to build as complete a picture as I can of people I didn’t really know well, besides what I picked up during visits … or as we were throwing logs into a fire.
Then, as I was holding the magazine, I realized that it was itself the endpoint of a connection between my grandmother and me. I, like her, find enough value in the tradition to share it with others, as I have on social media each year since the pandemic. Without knowing that she’d once done so, I sat at my own keyboard in my own office and sent out a message to the world about a thing that our family did that was important to me. Across a half century and halfway across the country, the same impulse from grandmother and grandson.
And now this essay about it, which will have to substitute for the alumni magazine.
Header photo: The segments of tree trunk that we used for our 2024 tradition.