Each year, as I pull the ornament boxes out of the
storage unit and drag them back to my house, I enter into a
holiday ritual that I have celebrated every
Christmas season that I can remember - the ritual of remembrance.
After wrestling the boxes into the house and pulling them over to the tree, the ritual begins. Mugs of hot cocoa are passed around, and the boxes are opened. First, the lights are strung on the tree, then this year’s hand-strung popcorn and cranberry garland is hung around the boughs. Finally, we get to what my daughter, Amy, refers to as "The Good Part".
We do not own a single ornament that doesn’t have a memory attached to it in some way. Here are the photo ornaments that we made from wood and glitter glue, the ones depicting our family over the years. Here is the plaster of paris print we made of Amy’s newborn foot, eleven months and three days before her first Christmas. Memories of trips made, of family events (Look! Here’s the Baby’s First Christmas ornament for my granddaughter!), of friendships, of love, of life changing events (we even have a miniaturized photocopy of my marriage license, in a miniature picture frame). But there’s more.
What’s this one? A star of David, made from popsicle sticks and adorned with black and white photographs of gaunt eyed children from a time long since past. Amy never really noticed this one until last year, when she asked me about it.
"I made that ornament when I was just a couple of years older than you are now, kiddo," I tell her.
"But what’s it for, who are those people?" She asks me, all wide-eyed innocence and curiosity.
And so I tell her the story of Mister Rosenstern and the monster.
"When I was about eight years old," I tell her, "I lived on Fayerweather Street in Cambridge. There were a lot of kids on the street, and we ran in a wild pack, playing hard every day until our parents called us in for supper. We played everywhere on the block, never caring or worrying about cutting through people’s yards or driveways - except at number 164. The monster lived there."
The eyes widen and Amy whispers "Monster?!?"
"Yup, monster. Every block has one, the grouchy old person who every kid is positive eats children for Sunday brunch. The one they run from when he comes out of his house, the one whose yard they don’t fetch their lost ball from, the one who they occasionally torment by doing things like ringing the doorbell and then running away, or toilet papering his trees on Halloween. Monsters, that’s what kids in my time thought they were.
"One day, Eric Brown dared me to ring the Monster’s doorbell and run away. Back then, kids weren’t taught that they could say no to peer pressure. If somebody dared us, we did the dare, or we were stigmatized as "scaredy-cats" forever after. I took Eric’s dare.
"Terrified, I quietly crept up the Monster’s front steps, as my friends watched from a few doors down and across the street. I could see them giggling with each other as I slowly went up those stairs. I reached the porch, then the front door, and I raised my finger to press the bell.
"All of a sudden, the front door whisked open and an old man’s hand grasped me firmly by the wrist. I let out a shriek that must have woken the dead, and struggling to get away, I saw my friends scatter, racing off down the street, leaving me at the mercy of the Monster.
" ’Why do you children torment me so?’, the old man asked me. There was no anger in his voice, just a simple question. I stammered my reply back to him ’Y-y-you’re a MONSTER!’ "
"The old man looked at me with amazing sadness, then he led me to the front steps and sat down on the top of the stoop, pulling me into a seated position beside him.
" ’I am not a monster, I am only a man,’ he said to me. ’But I have known monsters in my life, oh yes, I have known monsters.’
"I asked him what he meant, and he unbuttoned his shirt sleeve and rolled it up, revealing a row of blue numbers tattooed into his skin. I had no idea then just what it was that I was seeing, but then he told me. The numbers were his identification number from Auschwitz, the Nazi concentration camp. I knew who the Nazis were, my father’s girlfriend was a Polish Jew who had escaped the Warsaw ghetto shortly before the uprising there, when she was only a toddler. Kris had taught my sister and I quite a lot about the Nazis, but I hadn’t known about these tattoos.
"Mister Rosenstern and I sat on his front steps for an hour, as he told me about the real monsters of this world, those who hate without just cause, those who hurt others for no valid reason. Those who spread horrible philosophies and killed for the joy of it.
"I walked away from his steps late that afternoon with a newfound understanding of what a monster really is. I also walked away with a new friend. Over the next several years, Mister Rosenstern and I became very close. He joined my family for many a dinner and I would visit and share lunch with him. We would walk to the park or to the corner store together, share hours of conversation on his porch and in his parlor. More than a neighbor and more than a friend, Mister Rosenstern became a grandfather to me.
"A few years after we met, he passed away. I was inconsolable for weeks, until the day that his lawyer called my father to tell him that I was mentioned in Mister Rosenstern’s will. My father and Kris took me to the lawyer’s office for the reading, where I was given an envelope and a battered wooden jewelry box.
"I opened the letter and found this note: "Dearest Jenny, Sometimes, God gives a man a second chance to regain some of the happiness that he has lost. I am fortunate to be one of those few that God gave this gift to when he sent you to my door that day. I lost my children, but in you I gained the grandchild that I never had. Remember my lost ones, in you they will live in memory. Your Zeidy, Henry Rosenstern"
"I needed Kris to tell me that Zeidy is Yiddish for ’Grandfather’.
"Opening the box, I found a small pile of photographs of a family. Mother, Father, and five gaunt eyed children, all wearing stars of David on their clothing, yet all smiling, as if they shared some secret joy.
"A year or two later, I took one of the photographs and cut the faces from it, made a star of David from popsicle sticks and glue, and glued the faces of my Zeidy and his family to it. Each year as I place this ornament on my tree, I remember a beloved friend and his murdered family, and I say a prayer of hope to God, that nobody will ever experience horrors of that sort ever again, that the monsters won’t rise to power again and perpetuate the grand scale of hatred and violence that they once did."
Amy was silent through this story, and when I had finished, she said to me "Oh Mommy," and then she fell silent, and just hugged me. Then she took the star and she placed it in the place of honor on our tree, the one that had always been reserved for her most recent photo ornament, front and center. "This belongs here, forever."
Ornaments are more than decoration. They are living memory, they are beauty, they are pain, and they are the triumph of the human spirit, all rolled up into a few popsicle sticks and a pipe cleaner, held together with Elmer's glue.
Ornaments are memory. They are love and they are unity.
Never forget.