Dad was Secretary of the Chamber of Commerce which would have been responsible for this sign greeting circa 1950.
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Note: My memoir of a distant place and time has become a post-Thanksgiving
tradition here.
It was 1953. My father was the secretary of the Chamber of Commerce in Cañon City, Colorado. We rented a big old stone ranch house just outside of town. Kit Carson was reputed to have signed a treaty with the Utes underneath
a massive old cottonwood in the back yard. Behind the tree was a big screen house and beyond that the barn, assorted sheds and outbuildings, the caretaker’s cottage
and the spring house built into the side of hill with its entry way of cut sod.
The day after Thanksgiving the men from town—the merchants, their sons plus some of the teachers from the high school, police and sheriff’s
deputies, and even a real cowboy or two
from nearby ranches came to build
the Christmas
street decorations.
They had two farm wagons drawn by enormous hairy-footed draft horses filled with spruce boughs. The
sharp smell of the sap still running
fresh from the cut branches
knifed through the crisp air. There was a lot of laughing
and shouting and some cussing as the men brought
armloads of the boughs
into the screen house.
They wore black and red checked hunting coats, overalls, wool caps with the earflaps down and yellow workman’s boots caked in mud.
My dad stood
out—tall, slim and handsome, his gray Stetson on his head, bundled
in a maroon corduroy jacket and olive twill trousers
from his Army uniform, shoes slick soled and polished. He pointed this way and that, creating
order out of the chaos, sure authority
resting lightly on him. He would take his turn with the bundles
and the other work, an extra hand where needed.
They strung heavy wire between steel fence posts sledged into the frozen ground by the screen house. They carefully
wound the boughs
around the cable twisting bailing wire to hold it in place. They twined the greenery with garlands of silver tinsel off of big reels. They laced strings of multi colored Christmas
lights along the length of wire.
Inside the screen
house on trestle tables made of rough planks other men made wreaths for the lampposts. Inside each wreath was a celluloid sign with a light bulb inside. Some were green
and said Happy Holidays others were red and
said Season’s
Greetings.
Even larger wreaths were made to tie to the center of the garlands. Multi-pointed stars or bells made of canvas and painted with bright red and yellow air craft dope were suspended inside the wreaths and
lit from inside with a light bulb. The work went on for hours while the men laughed
and smoked and sometimes
took pulls from pocket flasks and passed whiskey bottles.
Meanwhile the wives had taken over the kitchen.
Mom built a wood fire in an old range on the screened-in back porch. Two big enamel pots of coffee—one
white and one blue with white speckles—bubbled on the fire.
Stacks of heavy
tan coffee mugs from the cafe downtown sat on a redwood table. The men would stomp up the back steps knocking the mud from their boots. They would remove their sap-encrusted gloves, blow on their hands and then wrap them around the mugs steaming with scalding black
coffee.
Inside was a flurry
of print dresses, clouds of flour, and high pitched chatter.
Pies were going into or coming out of the oven. Thick stew simmered
in enamel pots that matched the coffeepots on
the porch. Into
the stew went potatoes, carrots, turnips and celery,
jars of last summer’s
home canned tomatoes,
huge white lima beans that had soaked in the dish pan over night, and chunks of beef,
venison,
and the remains of more than one of yesterday’s turkeys. There were corn bread and biscuits, jars of pickled beets.
At noon the men lumbered in and piled the food on enameled tin plates and then took them outside to eat sitting on the fenders of their Buicks, Packards, and Studebakers or the running
boards of battered ranch
pickup trucks. When the feast was gulped down, the women took turns over the steaming dishpans, scrubbing until their
arms turned pink.
By mid-afternoon the job was done. The screen house and yard were strewn with trampled spruce twigs and scraps of tinsel. The garlands were carefully
laid out in the wagons that had brought the boughs. The men got into their cars
and trucks. Horns blaring they drove off behind the wagons to string the five blocks of downtown
Main Street with the decorations.
Silence descended
on the yard with the gray coming of evening. A boy danced with unimaginable excitement. Christmas was coming!
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