This is my annual Christmas piece, which first appeared on IrishCentral.com and on this blog in December 2013.

Abie's Christmas

I have always had a fondness for Jewish people at Christmas time. I remember one dark winter night the week before Christmas many years ago, when Marge Coyle came to the door and spoke with my mother, their heads inclined, their words cloaked in adult whispers. She handed my mother a slip of paper that Mommy clutched in her protective palm. It was a furtive conspiratorial handoff, as if they were passing contraband. 

        The next day my brother Gerard and I, twelve and thirteen, walked half a mile through the streets of the Bronx with our mother, following that mysterious piece of paper like a treasure map that brought us to Abie's Toy Shop on West Kingsbridge Road. It was for Gerard and me like unearthing a chest of pirate's gold.

        Abie's was, in fact, the answer to a Christmas prayer. My father, a bakery mechanic, had been laid off some weeks earlier, caught up in a wave of consolidations among the three national bakeries that still operated plants in the Bronx in 1961. It was to be a very humble Christmas. Still, we clung to our family holiday traditions. My mother assembled the cardboard fireplace with its red and white painted bricks and perched it snugly against the living room wall. We hung our stockings from its cardboard mantel. My brothers and sisters and I—the six of us—jostled daily to see who would get to open the new window of the advent calendar. And we got the tree.

            Every year we walked with our father down to Elm Place, a block away on E. 188th Street. At Mike Sedano's tree lot outside the Mayo Inn, Dad and Mike would dicker awhile, then seal the bargain by spitting on their hands, shaking on the deal, and stepping into the bar for a ball and a beer while the six of us sized up the tree outside. In perhaps my father's proudest moments, we'd follow him home, 
Rose Ann, Elizabeth, Gerard, and I carrying the trunk, while Richard and little Christopher trailed behind holding the tapered branches of the treetop in our annual family Christmas parade.

        The scent of freshly cut balsam filled the apartment. After the tree was decorated with bubble lights, colored lights, and Christmas ornaments galore, we draped it with tinsel and arranged the Nativity scene beneath the lower branches. Then we'd lie for what seemed hours playing "Colors," in which we'd each announce in turn "'I'm looking at something . . . red," and the rest of us would offer, "Is it this?" "Is it that?" all the while Christmas carols jingled in the background. More than six decades later, I still recall where the needle got stuck on Brenda Lee's "Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree" on our record player whenever I hear it. But more than that I remember the 
Coyles, neighbors in our building, decent, caring folks who couldn't bring themselves to celebrate the season of giving with their two sons Jimmy and Philip knowing that my parents had no toys for their six children that year. And so, as people of goodwill do in every time and place, they made arrangements.

        Our working class Bronx neighborhood in the Irish Catholic enclave of Tiebout Avenue didn't have much daily contact with Jewish people—or with many Protestants, for that matter. In fact, as far as I was aware, we barely knew any Jews. We used to know Terry and Herbert and their kids Bonnie and Howie, of course—friends in our pervious neighborhood—but we'd lost contact with them years ago. There were the Siegels in Apt. 4B and Mrs. Aaron in 2A with the strange little mezuzas beside their doors. And the Starkys in the building across the alley, refugees from the Nazi atrocities in the war who were persecuted still by some people in the neighborhood. And then there was Mrs. Weinstein, the kindly old woman several neighborhoods to the north, whose sidewalk Warren Bacon, Gerard, and I would shovel for a dollar and steaming, frothy cups of hot chocolate. But aside from Mr. Abromowitz, who owned the dry cleaning store just around the corner, we had little contact with Jewish people in our daily affairs. Just like the other insular neighborhoods surrounding our parochial school, we were growing up, for the most part, among people just like ourselves.

        So Abie was as much a novelty to Gerard and me as was his toy store. A small white-haired man with bushy bows and deep-set eyes he sat alone behind the counter of his narrow shop, rising to greet us as we entered. Our mother muttered something to him in the hushed and reticent tone of one who knew she was about to accept charity. I heard her mention Mr Coyle, and Abie's face brightened. His eyes, it seems to me now, conveyed the empathy of one who had himself known over the years what it was to want. It wasn't exactly deprivation—proud working class people, we would never allow ourselves to use that word, for we never thought of ourselves as poor, and I can barely bring myself to use it now But Abie's eyes knew what it was like to be bruised by life.

        "Ah, yes, yes, or course . . . come right in, mother," he said in a grainy voicer that made me want to clear my throat. "I vant that you should fill these bags." He moved in a shuffling gait, his arm gesturing in a wide, sweeping arc toward a pile of bags on the floor behind the counter, as if we'd be doing him a favor by complying with his wish. 

        The toys in Abie's Toy Shop were displayed everywhere: stacked on shelves, hung on pegboards, and dangled from the ceiling like tempting fruit. It was a child's view of paradise, and Gerard and I were enchanted, lost in the bounty of it all: trucks and games and hula hoops and skates, Lincoln Logs and Tinker Toys, baseball glovers and balls, jump ropes and toy pianos. There were Barbie dolls and Mr. and Mrs. Potato Heads and Fort Apache sets, cowboy hats and guns in holsters, spinning tops and yo-yos—the most wondrous toys imaginable—as far as the eye could see.

        But as we were leaving, burdened by he sacks slung over our shoulders, what I remember most was the kind, knowing smile on Abie's face. "Vat for?" he replied to our mother's humble thanks. "Merry Christmas, mother, Merry Christmas," he said with a gentle nod and a finger to his lips. And I was left to wonder—for but  a moment—if just like Jesus, Santa was really Jewish too.

        We made our way home through the holiday crowds that afternoon faster than we had come, despite—or perhaps because of—

the bundles we carried. Old enough to be entrusted with the origin of our bounty, Gerard and I were drafted into the conspiracy of adults in hiding the toys from our younger brothers, Richard and little Christopher, until—Christmas Eve come round at last—the gifts would appear, mysteriously, under the tree. There would be no coal in the stockings that year after all, thanks to Santa Claus, Mr. and Mrs. Coyle, and a kindly old Jewish man named Abie.

        

"You People from the 1900s"

 

                             Sculpture by Brian Keith, Danville, CA

When I was still a young high school teacher in the late 1970s, any references to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy were met with befuddled stares. I might as well have been alluding to the death of Abraham Lincoln nearly a hundred years earlier. A decade later, following the explosion of the Space Shuttle Challenger in 1986, my allusion to the mythical Icarus flying too close to the sun drew similarly puzzling looks from my seniors. So did most references to the opening of a Pandora's Box or to Sisyphus rolling a rock uphill. My students had a better chance of understanding allusions to Prometheus offering the gift of fire to man or to Atlas supporting the world on his shoulders, given the prominent statues of those mythological figures at Rockefeller Center in midtown Manhattan, just over thirty miles from our school. But even that was far from guaranteed. 

        To provide a foundation for the rich array of classical and biblical allusions that our students would encounter in their reading, my suburban public school's English department taught Greek and Roman mythology, The Odyssey, Oedipus Rex, and excerpts from The Bible for Students of Literature and Art. Sometimes it helped, sometimes it didn't. In the 2010s, near the close of my career, a few of my AP Lit seniors would identify some of Shakespeare's allusions to mythology or Toni Morrison's biblical references in her title Song of Solomon, but her ironic allusion to Pontius Pilate in the novel elicited bovine stares from many in the class. As church attendance continued its decline in that first decade of the new century, fewer and fewer of my AP seniors recognized T.S. Eliot's allusion to John the Baptist in The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock. But occasionally, they delighted themselves (and me) by recognizing mythological and biblical allusions in Hardy's novels The Mayor of Casterbridge and Tess of the D'Urbervilles.

         Among my fondest memories of teaching is my rare quintuple impression, an allusion to Dead Poet's Society as we viewed the film in class. It's a multilayered imitation of Mr. Kersting doing Robin Williams doing Mr. Keating doing John Wayne doing Macbeth: "Is that a dagger I see before me?" voiced in John Wayne's clipped cadences and enacted with his lumbering swagger. "Who's John Wayne?" someone asked. Alas.

        Ours is not the first generation to bemoan the deficiencies of its youth. As far back as classical times philosophers complained about the ignorance of the young. Closer to home, Mark Twain once said, "When I was seventeen I was convinced my father was a damn fool. When I was twenty-one I was astounded by how much the old man had learned in four years." In 2017, the writer John McPhee quoted columnist Frank Bruni on a class Bruni was teaching at Princeton a few years earlier: "[H]ardly a class goes by when I don't make an allusion that prompts my students to stare at me as if I had just dropped in from the Paleozoic era. . . . [In] a discussion of an essay that repeatedly invoked Proust's madeleine . . . I realized that almost none of the students understood what the madeleine signified, or, for that matter, who this Proust fellow was." McPhee then related Bruni's fears that "all of us are losing . . . our 'collective vocabulary.' . . . Are the common points of reference dwindling? Has the personal niche supplanted the public square?" Bruni wondered.      

        Responding to Bruni, McPhee wrote, "My answer would be that the collective vocabulary and common points of reference are not only dwindling now but have been for centuries. The dwindling may have become speedier, but it is an old and continuous condition." There is truth to McPhee's point, of course. Up until the mid-Twentieth century, Greek and Latin languages (with all of the classical allusions they afforded) were requirements in the core curriculum of most American universities. Many core requirements have undergone further moderation by the first quarter of of the current century.

        Today my 14-year-old granddaughter, Chloé, refers wryly to her parents, my wife, and me as "you people from the 1900s." Her generation, of course, is far more comfortable in their own world than in ours. Given the amount of time they devote to video games, films, and social media, it's safe to say they'll be well versed in allusions to the visual storytelling of cinema, Internet memes, and game and fantasy worlds. Beyond the digital sphere, the lyrics of Leonard Cohen's 1984 song "Hallelujah," alluding to the biblical stories of Samson and Delilah and David and Bathsheba, were reintroduced into the youth mainstream in 2021 by the soundtrack if the film Shrek. Like their grounding in Harry Potter in their youth, these worlds are a trove of such mythological and biblical allusions. 

        So perhaps there's hope after all for the preservation of a mutual cultural context, a reservoir of references to a common knowledge, familiar values, and a shared experience, even if they're different from our own. As social media has come to dominate the personal square and the collective vocabulary in 2025, our common points of reference are expanding visually as they contract textually. In an Instagram and Tik Tok world, digital memes and videos are ubiquitous today, forming a new collective "visual vocabulary" as common points of reference in the public square of the Internet. Perhaps as engagement in that communal space becomes more visual and interactive, we "people from the 1900s" need to be less critical and more receptive. After all, like Mark Twain's youth, we might be astounded by how much we can learn in a few years.

 

A FOOTPRINT IN TIME

We all leave a footprint in this world. Perhaps it’s a physical imprint, something we’ve created or a place we’ve contributed something to. Sometimes what we leave behind is our impact on others—an idea, an attitude, a conviction that, through us, has touched their lives. Often we leave our mark by how our words and actions encourage or inspire others, how our listening or refusal to judge empowers them. At times, regrettably, we impact others by how we discourage or hamper them. One way or another, we have left our mark.

            Typically what we leave behind are the stories friends and family tell of us. It has often been said that we die three times: when the body ceases to function, when we are buried, and when our name is spoken for the last time. Within a few generations most of us recede from memory, consigned to a leaf on a family tree and fading with the passage of time toward the oblivion of "the ancestors.” But stories can keep us alive long after we are gone.

            I have memories from an early age of my maternal grandparents, Nana and Papa, and stories I still tell of them. Nana scrubbed office floors at night to outfit her ten grandchildren at Easter every year. Papa was an auto mechanic who, like many a good garage technician, could diagnose a problem just by listening to the engine. I recall their physical presence too. Nana was a heavy woman who waddled when she walked, a loving grandmother capable of both tender hugs and disdainful stares of disapproval that live on two generations later as the “Nana look.” Papa, with the swarthy complexion of the dark Irish and deep sorrowful eyes, would sit contentedly on the couch, a grandchild on his knee. My paternal grandmother died when my dad was only eight, so of her I have only a few stories to tell, like the one of dad in his childhood grief crying under the front steps when his mother’s coffin was carried out of the house for burial. My paternal grandfather died when I was just one, but I have known him all my life from the many stories my dad would tell of him, like the time my grandfather lied about his age to enlist and serve in the Spanish-American War.

            I hope to keep all my grandparents alive in the stories of them that my sons tell to their own children, even though they never knew them in life. I know that my boys will pass on to their own children stories of my mom and dad, of whom they have their own fond memories, and I hope that they, in turn, will pass them along to their descendants. 

            In addition to the fading photos of earlier generations, today we have the legacy of videos that will conjure not only our images, but our voices, actions, and mannerisms as well. In all these ways, but most of all through stories, I like to think that my children and my grandchildren will remember me and speak fondly of me from time to time when I am gone. Then, although I will have passed from this life, I will come to live beyond my allotted days every time my name is still spoken.

 

Spaldeen Dreams

This time of year, when the grip of winter seemed broken at last and a hint of spring was in the air, we would dream our spaldeen dreams in the Bronx. Soon it would be time for stickball. The grainy feel of the ball, the pok of the bounce, the thwak as a broomstick sent it sailing the length of two sewers, the bubble gum pink of the rubber, the smells of the City, the taste of summer. All of these were conjured by the 2 ¼-inch rubber ball marketed as the Spalding High-Bounce Ball, but known to every kid on the streets of the Bronx as a "spaldeen."

        Always preferred to the heavier, spongier, and cheaper Pensy Pinky, the Spaldeen was the ball of choice for any street game that mattered: catch, boxball, hit the stick, king queen, stoopball (off the point), I declare war, punchball, and of course, stickball. With hundreds of families living on our block, there were usually enough kids around to form two teams for a game of stickball. When the Spaldeen landed on a rooftop, the kid who'd hit it there had to climb five flights to retrieve it, often firing it back down at his friends from the edge of the roof. How that ball would bounce!

        If the ball rolled down a sewer, though, we rarely had 17¢ among us to buy a new spaldeen, even if we'd called "chips on the ball," so we'd reenact an age-old Bronx street ritual. If you sank the ball in the sewer, you'd open the round manhole cover on the corner while someone ran for a coat hanger from Mr. Abromowitz, the local dry cleaner. You'd shape the hanger into an Easter egg scoop, then your best friend in the whole wide world would hold you by the ankles as you spread out on the ground. Holding your breath, you'd reach down into the sewer to scoop up the Spaldeen before any of the legendary sewer crocs that inhabited the bowels of the Bronx in those days could snatch you into the foul and murky depths.

        We would often go to any lengths to catch a spaldeen and keep the rhythm of a stickball game going, to make the play while the whole neighborhood watched. The lower third of Tiebout Avenue just south of Fordham Road was our infield, the one way  sweep of East 188th Street our contested outfield. We shared it with four lanes of traffic. Many a catch was made bobbing and weaving and dodging and leaping in front of cars to save the game. It was the catch you dreamed of. The cheers of the neighborhood silenced the blaring horns of the horrified drivers. 

        When I think of the sheer madness of it now, all these years later, I'm aghast at the danger. We'd never permit our own children or grandchildren to take such risks today. But those were the days of our childhood in the Bronx 65 years ago, when the streets were our playground and spaldeens were the currency of our fun. Somehow, despite ourselves, we all managed to survive our spaldeen dreams. 

St. Brigid’s Day and the Coming of Spring

The first day of February marks the feast of Imbolc in the pre-Christian Celtic calendar in Ireland. Midway between the winter and spring solstices it heralds the traditional start of spring, a season of rebirth and fertility as Nature slowly wakes from her long deep slumber. Since Christian times in the fifth century, it also marks the feast of St. Brigid of Kildare, long observed by the weaving of a Brigid’s Cross from fresh rushes. These woven crosses adorn many Irish doorways invoking the saint’s blessings on the home. 

            With the coming of Christianity to Ireland, the Church often integrated pagan customs and beliefs into the Christian practices. St. Brigid, as we know her today, is likely a melding of that holy woman with an earlier Celtic fertility goddess, Brid, or Brigid, said to be the patron of healers, smiths, and poets. A daughter of the chief god Dagda, the pagan Brigid was a goddess of the mythical tribe Tuatha Dé Danann, an underground people often associated with the Sidhe, or fairy folk in Irish tradition. 

            And so as the cycle of the seasons comes round once more, spring has come early again to Ireland. The snowdrops and crocuses are up, and the birches and whitethorns, hazel, oak, and ash will soon come into leaf. Here in America, what does it matter that the groundhog might see its shadow or not in the early days of February? As inveterate New Yorkers will know, we still have six more weeks of winter before us here. Yet, in the darkness of the bleak midwinter, the days grow perceptibly longer and the daffodils peek out from beneath the melting snows. Within the soil, seeds are coming to life. Soon enough the snowdrops and crocuses and buds on the trees will start to sprout here too. There is hope of brighter days ahead, as the Brigid’s Cross above the doorway reminds us.

Of Hope and Despair: Gross Île, Canada's Irish Famine Memorial

   

In the early months of 1847, the authorities in Quebec braced for an influx of immigrants fleeing the cholera epidemic that was raging in Europe. They expected 12,000 arrivals, mostly refugees of what would come to be known as “Black ’47,” the worst year of the Irish Famine. Over 100,000 arrived. The medical inspection facility and quarantine station on Gross Île in the St. Lawrence River were woefully unprepared. 

Opened in 1832 to treat immigrants from a cholera epidemic that had struck Europe the previous year, Gross Île (pronounced Gross Eel, meaning Large Island) is an island in the St. Lawrence River near the village of Saint-Antoine-de-I’Isle-aux Grues, Quebec, just under thirty miles upriver from Quebec City. Gross Île, three miles long and one mile wide, was to serve as a waystation where immigrants to Canada would undergo a health inspection before proceeding downriver to Quebec City or Montreal. The sick were quarantined on Gross Île. 

According to British historian Cecil Woodham-Smith, in The Great Hunger, her 1962 account of the Great Famine in Ireland, Dr. George Douglas, the medical officer on Gross Île, had requested £3,000 to prepare the facilities to accommodate the anticipated throng of immigrants. He was given about £300 by the British authorities in charge of the Canadian government. (Canada would not become a self-governing dominion within the British Empire until 1867, twenty years later.) 

As the ice on the St. Lawrence was late to thaw in the spring of 1847, the first of the immigrant ships did not arrive at Gross Île until the middle of May. By the end of that month, Woodham-Smith tells us, forty ships were at anchor in the St. Lawrence stretching for two miles waiting to be processed. The hospital facilities at the immigration depot were overcrowded, and onboard the vessels at anchor, typhus, known as “ships fever,” was rampant. With nowhere to inspect them on the island, healthy passengers were ordered to quarantine aboard ship for fifteen days after the sick were removed. But in the cramped confines and fetid air of the ships, thousands were infected by typhus and never made it to land alive.

By the first week of June, 25,000 immigrants were quarantined on Gross Île and on ships  at anchor. By the end of July quarantine had become so untenable that Dr. Douglas permitted healthy immigrants to be admitted to Canada after a mere cursory check by a doctor onboard the deck of each ship. Some who appeared healthy travelled to Quebec City, but most were shipped downriver by steamer to Montreal. Others were carried by barge on the St. Lawrence to other Canadian ports. 

Authorities estimate that over 3,000 immigrants died on Gross Île in 1847, most of them fleeing the famine in Ireland. Over 5,000 are buried in the Irish cemetery there, many of whom died abord the ships. It is the largest graveyard for refugees of the Great Famine outside Ireland.

        In 1909, a 46’ by 8’ stone Celtic cross was erected on the highest point on the island to commemorate the Irish dead. In 1974, the Canadian government designated the quarantine station on Gross Île as the Irish Memorial National Historic Site. 

Today the Irish cemetery on the island is a short walk through a hilly woodland from the Celtic cross. An eerie silence prevails. Etched into the base of the granite cross are these words:

                                                        

      Sacred to the memory of 

                                                   thousands of Irish emigrants                                                  who, to preserve the faith, 

       suffered hunger and exile,

                                                    in 1847-48, and stricken with                                                                                      fever ended here  their                                           sorrowful pilgrimage.

   

                                                                                                                                                                          

                                                                                                                      

Home for Christmas

 

 

In his story “Christmas is a Sad Season for the Poor,” John Cheever depicts the loneliness and misery of poor people amidst the festive displays of the affluent. We don’t need to hark back to the world of Dickens’s Bob Cratchit and Tiny Tim to realize that joy to the world is not universally shared, even in our own land of plenty. The holidays are actually far from merry and bright for many in our midst. For the homeless among us, the loners, the alienated, the grieving, and all those far from home, Christmas is often a bleak and lonesome time in a season of merriment, a time when countless people have nowhere to go “home” to where joy awaits them. We would do well, those of us who are more fortunate, to spare a thought at this festive season for those who are not so blessed this year and to share our bounty with them.                    

    

    For most of us, “I’ll be home for Christmas” takes on altered meanings in our lives as the years proceed. In childhood it means celebrating the holiday with all the familiar traditions in the warmth of the family home: holly and ivy are draped, mistletoe hung, the tree is trimmed with the nativity scene beneath it, eggnog and gingerbread cookies are served, and doors on the Advent calendar opened while carols fill the air. Whatever our own family traditions, they are likely the cherished memories that come to mind each Christmas season for those of us who celebrate. But as our circumstances and our notion of family evolve with the years, so does our sense of  “home.”

While our parents are still alive, their home is often still the center of holiday celebrations, time and circumstance permitting. For some that means spending part of the holiday there. For others it’s merely stopping by for a visit at Christmastime. For still others it may mean sharing some cherished time on a video call. In our early years of marriage, we often have two parents’ homes to "come home to" for the holidays. Then, as our own families grow our home becomes the center of celebrating with our own children, our blended family traditions of pfeffernusse and rum balls, stollen and Christmas crackers becoming their own, the Christmas customs they’ll one day remember. Anyway we manage it, “coming home” for Christmas is a joy central to the season for most of us.

Amidst the valued traditions our families reenact each Christmas, we are left, as the years slip away, with the absence of loved ones who are no longer with us, the ghosts of Christmas past. No one in my life has ever appreciated the joys of Christmas as much as my late sister Rose Ann had in her time among us. By making her own decorations each year, stringing the lights, baking holiday goodies, and visiting with family, she embodied the joys of the season and passed on that legacy to her own three children. In her exhilaration my Sis showed us all how to keep Christmas well. 

     Last year my nephew Edmond died well before his time. And just before Thanksgiving this year, we lost another one of our family anchors when my cousin Catherine died in Florida. As with the death of her brother Al many years earlier, it was one of those losses that rocks you to the core, but—as with Sis and Edmond and Al—we found solace in having had Cat in our lives. While the passing of someone dear can sometimes overshadow the celebrations in a season of loss, we may find it comforting to enjoy the holiday in their name, observing the festivities for them as they themselves had done when they were among us. Perhaps we might, in that sense, “bring them home for Christmas” once again.