This is a Miller Avenue Musings re-run
Christmas time at the Myers house on Seymour Avenue was always fun. Though snow never settled in Mill Valley there was a crisp wintery feel in the air and strangers seemed to be that little bit friendlier when you passed them on the street.
Of course Christmas, like all the other holidays was sold to people with all the skills that Madison Avenue possessed but in our home it was a little bit gentler partly because my parents didn't have the money to lavish big expensive presents on us. Also there was no religion in our house so the celebration of Christ's birth was simply a charming ritual which children loved.
Both my parents were political people of the left and in a way our arrival in Mill Valley in 1952 was kind of a refuge from the severe effects of the blacklisting my dad had experienced on the east coast. They had good friends here who all chipped in to help the Myers family out.
On our first Christmas at 10 Seymour Avenue I was six years old and my younger brother Jim and I both believed in Santa Claus. My parents went to great lengths to make this reality come true for Jimmy and I while Katie, a fourth grader and Nell, a sixth grader, clearly no longer fell for that one.
One of the great sensations about this time of year was the smell of the tree once it was up. There is no aroma more distinctive or friendly than a Douglas Fir standing upright in your living room.
Our decorations, which would come out of storage, consisted of brightly coloured bulbs, candy canes and various little trinkets to hang on the tree and at some stage we would throw freshly purchased thin strips of tinsel at the tree so it hung like icycles.
When it came to the tree we had to surrender to the dictates of our father Blackie who had two rigid rules. The first was that we couldn't have lights on it and the second was that we were not allowed to decorate it until Christmas Eve.
On both these counts we were seriously out of step with everybody we knew as practically all our friends had their trees up and decorated with lights well before the big day.
I think my father considered Christmas lights to be dangerous but he almost certainly disapproved of them for being a modern thing. When he was young, people would put candles on trees and doubtless there were many house fires started that way.
One of the stories he always told us about his childhood in Brooklyn was of the Christmas Eve that his father was unable to afford to buy the family a tree. His solution to this problem was to ask permission to scoop up the offcuts at the tree lot and bring them home. He then whittled several holes into a broomstick and stuck the branches into what became the Myers family tree that year.
There was always music playing in our household and, though we did have a few Christmas discs with songs like Silent Night, we were not restricted in what we listened to on the record player so the sound of Fats Waller's piano or Ella Fitzgerald's voice fit right in with the seasonal spirit.
One of the best days of the season was the Saturday shopping trip to the city with my brother Jim. We'd catch the Greyhound bus at the stop on Miller just below Una Way and make the journey across the bridge. Jim and I would go to a movie, have lunch at Mannings on Market Street and do our shopping mostly around the Union Square area. Macy's, I. Magnum's, City Of Paris and Woolworth's all saw a lot of us.
A particular feature of visiting City Of Paris was to take in their absolutely enormous Christmas tree which I believe had to be lowered by crane through the dome topped roof each year.
Money was always tight in our house but a few of my parents' closest friends were seriously rich and every year each of the four Myers kids would receive a check from one of them which constituted our Christmas shopping money.
The anticipation which preceded the big morning was intense so after the tree was decorated on Christmas Eve we would go off to bed in our pyjamas. I recall tossing and turning for a very long time, overwhelmed by the excitement, but somehow I always managed to fall asleep.
The presents didn't come out of hiding until after we were in bed so that the sight we beheld when we awoke was truly magical. The combination of the tinsel hanging from the tree along with its cheerful aroma and the new addition of a mountain of beautifully wrapped presents under its branches made us all dance with joy.
Everything was wonderful until all the presents had been opened. Of course there were new toys to play with, new books to look at and possibly new records to listen to. I remember getting Elvis Presley's first LP one Christmas.
There was still Christmas dinner to look forward to but I'm always reminded of a Dennis The Menace cartoon in the Chronicle which featured him surrounded by his unwrapped presents saying: "Is this all?" Somehow this cartoon seemed truthful about the lull which would occur after all the surprises were out and their value was thus diminished.
Of course the 25th of December meant different things to different people as anyone listening to Stan Freberg's Green Christmas would realise. Set in the boardroom of an advertising executive greeted by his employees as "Mister Scrooge," the disc was a hilarious satire on the way Madison Avenue always used Christmas to make money.
Two people of my acquaintance actually ran Christmas tree lots. Tom Connell, who we knew through the Dreyfus family ran a lot down by the heliport opposite the Fireside Motel. Tom was many years older than us unlike Jeff Mayer, who was only a year ahead of me at Tam and he also sold trees, I think, somewhere near Alto.
Jeff was a jolly rotund fellow with greased back black hair who chain smoked and worked after school at the Purity Supermarket opposite Eberhardt's Mobil station. In fact he was a naturally enterprising guy who ran his own car, a 1948 Plymouth coupe, on the proceeds of his various earnings.
Jeff was unusual. He was an only child who lived with his mother on the hill which rose above the Alto flats and, precisely where dad was, I never knew, as it didn't come up. He was an entirely independent young man who never, I believe, ever took hand outs from his mom. What he had he made himself.
I did spend a fair bit of time riding around with Jeff. He was a naturally funny person who always wore a checked plaid shirt which he never tucked into his jeans. The closest thing to a political opinion I ever heard from Jeff was his avowed atheism which he could become quite confrontational about, insisting in very convincing terms that there was definitely no god.
I remember him getting up in front of a packed Mead Theater when he was rally commissioner and, realising he had nothing to say, he simply began laughing. Within moments the effect was contagious and crackled through the audience which began howling with laughter for what seemed a very long time.
The last I heard of Jeff Mayer was from Jack Benjamin, another Mill Valley entrepreneur, who told me he was working in Hollywood as a comedian.
So for someone liked Jeff, Christmas was simply a time to make some money but that most definitely was alien to us in the Myers household.
When we were little My sisters would take Jimmy and I on a walking tour up and down the hills of Mill Valley, delivering presents to my parents' friends and at each house we would sing Christmas carols and be rewarded with mugs of hot chocolate.
Christmas always seemed to bring out the best in people…at least for a little while.
