Elisabeth Haggblade

Elisabeth Haggblade

Christmas in Tivoli

A week before Christmas Vati, my foster father, brought into the kitchen a four-foot spruce he had just cut from somewhere and stood it up on a stand he had made by nailing two wooden slats together crosswise, cutting out a round opening in the middle to wedge in the tree. It smelled fresh of forest with melted frost droplets still glistening on its branches.

He placed it in the corner next to the buffet and began decorating it with apples, oranges, and walnuts. Vati took thin copper wire he had cut into fiveinch lengths and pushed one through the center of each fruit, bending the protruding end so that the fruit held. He shaped the upper extension into a hook to hang the apples and oranges onto the tree branches. He tried the same method with the walnuts with somewhat less success because of their hard shells.

Aunt Meta and I helped by wiring four-inch-tall white candles to the ends of the branches. We did not have little candle holders that came with clip-on snaps for that purpose. Fruit and candles were all we had for decorations. I thought our tree rather festive once the candles were burning, warming the resiny fruity air.

With his sonorous bass voice Vati, the old WWI and WWII warrior, slowly intoned Es ist ein Ros’ entsprungen (“Lo, How a Rose E’er Blooming”), a melody that still resonates deeply with me today. He also played the harmonica quite well. Adi chimed in with more songs of the season. Vati and Aunt Meta knew by heart all the verses of the old songs, while I could only hum along after the first one. The blending of voices rendered our little hut almost reverential, conjuring in my mind thoughts of Christmas angels like those depicted on Advent chocolates and candy wrappers.

We munched on some cookies or a piece of Guglhopf (a type of pound cake)—quite tasty when Aunt Meta baked it. Maybe we even had a cup of real coffee. The men drank beer and stronger stuff that I don’t recall.

The treats must have reminded Vati of his youth in Thuringia. In telling his stories, his voice became more and more gravelly with drinking as he segued into his war experiences.

He told of the time he was riding his bike along a country road in the east in 1944 when he was approached by a Polish man who stopped him, motioning to turn over the bike to him with the few German words: “Das ist mein. Jetzt kannst Du laufen” ([the bike] is mine. Now it’s your turn to walk). Vati thought it best to do as told because he was on Polish territory, land that had been traded back and forth between Germany and Russia.

Adi, my foster brother, then followed with his story of being in the German infantry in 1943. It was Christmas Eve. The soldiers decided to fry a stack of

pancakes for supper when their guard came running in warning of an approaching enemy patrol. They hurried out of the tents and hid in the surrounding forest. When it was quiet again, they returned. The pancakes had gone missing. The Brits had absconded with them. In exchange, they had left a box of cigarettes with a thank-you-note and a Merry Christmas wish.

With thoughts of war on their minds, Vati and Adi shifted to singing wartime pop songs like “Lili Marleen.”

The air in our hut had thickened with wafts of cigarette smoke and fumes of alcohol. The men’s pitch rose, arms started to gesticulate. There was nothing stopping Vati now as he worked up a sweat ranting and raving about the war, about what would have been, could have been, should have been.

The tone in our kitchen started to get serious. Adi tried to steady Vati as he lurched toward him wielding a large kitchen knife. When Adi caused him to drop it, Vati in his rage lunged for the few dishes we had, smashing every plate, bowl, and glass within reach to smithereens. Aunt Meta and I were crouching in a corner by the stove trying to avoid the shards raining off the wall.

Vati’s thunderous stream of consciousness began to dissolve into grunts. He was done. He lumbered, head bent, shoulders sagging, toward his bed, a broken man acknowledging his entire family destroyed by war and self-destructed by disappointment, anger, and alcohol.

The burning candle wicks on the Christmas tree began to spat, sizzle, and crackle as they neared the end of their life, warm melting wax dripping from the branches. It was time to extinguish what was left of them. The fruity tree decorations, too, were on the wane, the apples dropping in pieces, the oranges into mush on the floor. Even the hardy walnuts were showing the first dark brown spot of decay.

Another Christmas had passed with thoughts of past Christmases ghosting about.