A Board Member suggested it would be nice to live in Evergreen, proving the invasion of Hallmark movies into our lives. Evergreen is a magical movie town in Vermont – actually filmed in Canada – complete with an enchanting street decked out in holiday glory. All I know about Vermont I learned from Larry and his brother Daryl and his other brother Daryl but it always seems to be extremely cold there. Memories of the childhood magic took me back the holidays of long, long ago in my hometown.
In those days Halloween was a distinct event lasting only one day, October 31st. Schools held Halloween Carnivals including decorated classrooms and musical chairs with homemade pies for prizes. Witches flew on brooms in our imagination, we carved pumpkins and dressed in costumes, trick or treated and then it was over. One day – not weeks on end of lawn decorations and month long horror movies watching on TV drinking pumpkin spiced anything. There were no Christmas decorations or Christmas music blearing in the department stores while ghost and goblins danced around.
Preparation for Thanksgiving was shopping for groceries. On Wednesday before the holiday, the school week would end but now public schools closed for the entire week and the stores are full of corncobs, turkeys and Pilgrim decorations to display on the big day. There were no Christmas trees present at the Thanksgiving meal but now we pushed the turkey off the table to make room for the elves, wise men and pine scented candles.
Back in the olden days, there were no Black Friday sales and Cyber Mondays were just a little bang theory in a cloud that had not mutated yet. We knew Christmas was coming because the downtown stores remained opened after five o’clock. Downtown Tuscaloosa was the only place to shop other than the Sears and Roebuck catalogue and we planned our wish list by circling items on the pages of toys. To our delight the town miraculously transformed with Christmas decorations on the streetlights, the Salvation Army Booth was erected and housed the bell ringer in front of F.W. Woolworths, and Santa held court in the Grants Department Store basement. Even the B.F. Goodrich Tire Store sold toys and bicycles during the three week Christmas shopping frenzy. There were plenty of lots selling cedar trees but many families simply went to the woods, cut down a tree, put it in a bucket of sand and placed it in the living room. The magic was short lived and that made it special.
Consumerism has made Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas into one big season that begins before Labor Day – a day that factories, schools and stores would close for the Labor Day Parade and crowning of the Labor Day Queen. Drugstores now place skeletons and ghosts next to Christmas snow globes with a few ceramic turkeys and scarecrows in between. Creepy haunted house music has mated with Over the Hills and through the Woods to Grandma’s House we go and birthed hound dogs barking Jingle Bells. It’s as if we put everything into a cauldron and brewed a “Witchkey Pudding.” But we left out one ingredient – the magic of Evergreen.
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