Blue Christmas

The legendary Little Blue Santa, of Akron, Ohio

For as long as I can remember, come December my parents screw a blue bulb into the porch light of their small house on Seventh Street.

Other decorations came and went: Wreathes we made in the 70s from cellophane dry cleaner bags. A ribbon around the mailbox. Blinking lights strung along the eaves. Tinsel drapes on the front door junipers.

But the blue bulb is eternal.

I never gave it much thought until someone asked me why.

Folklorist that I am, I string a story together, as I am wont to do.

I recall my Dad's family's simple tree-top star, blue glass with a single bulb in the center, which topped our tree every year until it was more glue than glass.

This was my Grandma Hildegarde's star, whose pride and joy was her silver aluminum Christmas tree, trimmed entirely with blue glass orbs, illuminated by a rotating color wheel on the glass enclosed sunporch of her Ellet retirement home.

I recall my grandma Hildegarde as one who kept Christmas well. She decked the halls, no, well-nigh festooned them, with Victorian Christmas villages, paper honeycomb bells, tinsel, and beads. An intricate handcrafted ornament, her gift to each grandchild. Her elaborate German Christmas cookies, which had to be aged in a paper bag for three weeks with an apple and an orange to reach proper consistency.

I recall our old family nativity, its shepherd with the cracked face, and Mary with her sweet angelic face, clad in a robe of celestial blue, sheltered in a wood hewn manger built by a family member now departed.

I recall my hometown's legendary Blue Santa, a tiny ceramic figure excavated in downtown Akron from an old factory site near the canal, a wise and kindly old elf, clad in blue glazed robes in the German tradition, said to be America's oldest known figure of Saint Nick.

I recall tales of ribald English Christmases of yore, when roving bands of Yuletide revelers might at anytime storm your halls demanding figgy pudding, or worse, in not so polite a manner, and how it is said English Victoria's betrothal to German Albert brought to England the more gentle German fireside Christmas traditions: a tree in the parlor, carols by the fireside, visits from St. Nick, and Luther's gentle lullabies to the Christ child, replacing bawdy English street carols and wassail-fueled debauchery.

I think of my German cobbler great-grandfather, and his shop below the lodge hall on the North Hill of Akron, at Temple Square, and tales of how he kept the shoe store open no matter how deep the snow, and kept a warm fire blazing in the stove in the back room, and how it was said that people came to his shop not so much for shoes as for the hospitality and warmth of the fire.

My great-grandfather, Henry Louis Hosfield, with the Gregory grandchildren. James, my Dad, standing, Grover center, Mickey on his lap.

 I think of my own father's sudden boughts of yuletide merriment, our epic journeys up Smith Road Hill in a raging blizzard, to get something for my Mom's birthday, the longest night of the year. It wasn't just a shopping trip to Polsky's, it was an adventure, and how in the spirit of Hildegarde, but with his own twist, my Dad kept Christmas well.

I think of manning the Jaycees tree lot as a tiny kid with my Dad, downtown Cuyahoga Falls at Broad Boulevard and Front Street when it was a vacant lot, and how we burned scrap lumber in a wooden barrel, and strands of bare bulbs illuminated the offerings, and how we kids gathered branches up off the ground to take home and place in glass Pepsi bottles to make Charlie Brown trees for the dog.

I think of my Dad in his earflap hat and wool coat and corncob pipe, in his element chatting up the tree lot customers, most likely not charging anyone the full retail price, and as Christmas grew close and the night grew late, he gave away more than one tree to the mother with the old coat and the sad eyes, or the family with the rusty car and the dangling muffler.

So, of course in my mind it is a clear trajectory, from Bavaria and O Tannenbaum and Stille Nacht to Akron's North Hill and Blue Santa, and my great grandfather's shoe store at Temple Square, and my grandmother Hildegarde's indominable Christmas spirit, and my Dad's own ways of keeping December festive. It all culminates with the blue bulb in the porch light on Seventh Street.

The 1978 Seventh Street Pageant. My sister, as Mary, of course is in blue. Tim holds Cuddles in her customary role, as a sheep.

 I weave my tale. I connect the dots. I ask my dad, finally, "Why the blue bulb?"

He considers it, for a moment, and says, simply, "Well, because a red bulb looks like a house of ill repute."

I ask my mom the same question. Of course, to her, it is all about the new fallen snow, and how of all the colors of light, it is the blue ones that sparkle on the snow that she has always liked best.

I try out my theory of the blue bulb on both of them, taking it back to Prince Albert and Luther, via Ellet and North Hill and Hildegarde's silver tree with the blue balls, and they both nod affirmatively. Oh, that's a good explanation, too.

So, no matter what the reason, for the better part of the four decades that this house has existed on Seventh Street, which was here as a dirt lane long before they put a number to it and this house sprouted in the side yard of an older one, there has been a blue bulb in the front porch light. It doesn't really matter why. But, if you'd like, I'll weave together a tale.