Gaye LeBaron: Memories of Christmas on North Coast painful, jubilant

(Editor’s note: This column is a holiday favorite that you may have seen before.)

Tucked away 11 months of the year along with the tissue-wrapped ornaments, they come out only at Christmas. These would be our Christmas memories. There are the ones that make us smile and maybe even laugh out loud. These are the ones told over and over again at Christmas dinner, especially the ones we can laugh about now that didn’t seem so funny at the time.

And then there are the ones we still cry over, but cannot push away. These are the toughest to deal with. It still makes me uncomfortable, when all the gifts are opened, to see one left behind, under the tree. It reminds me of what you do about a present for a father who has not regained consciousness after neurosurgery.

You wrap the obligatory plaid Pendleton shirt and put it under the tree and then you pray.

I’ve lost two fathers at Christmas. One when I was 7, after a long, debilitating illness, and the other, the aforementioned dearly loved stepdad, when I was 26 and the mother of a month-old daughter. I watched my mother in her struggle to be merry every holiday for the rest of her blessedly long life.

Mercifully, there are other kinds of memories to tip the scales toward pure joy. The best ones, of course, are the happy ones, the ones we tell over and over again. Even the most reticent can have a holiday memory coaxed out of them.

My husband, John, tried to claim that he had no family stories about Christmas. When I tried to pry one out of him, he fell back on the old standards that he tells his grandson - the day his father’s cat Felix had a fit and died under the kitchen table, and the one he calls “Uncle Harry and Mush,’’ a cautionary tale about the time his uncle fed him the oatmeal for lunch that he had refused to eat at breakfast. These were not Christmas events, and I told him they didn’t count.

Pressed, he did volunteer that he remembered that the Santa Claus from Tomasini’s Hardware in Petaluma came to his school, American Valley Grammar in Valley Ford, on the back of a truck made to look like a sleigh. And that one year, when he was home with a cold, Santa came to his house.

We share memories like Tomasini’s Santa, of bygone Christmases in Santa Rosa, with the junior college chorus singing carols at the ceremonial lighting of the Cedar of Lebanon tree that Luther Burbank planted to mark his grave, and the way the Sonoma County Courthouse, outlined in lights, illuminated the whole downtown.

The ones we can laugh about now that the wounds have healed or the mess has been cleaned up are perhaps the most vivid. Around our house, there’s the year that Sam the Cat, may he rest in peace, tried to climb the tree.

And, worst yet, the year the tree fell over - the result of being placed in a corner with no ornaments to balance at the back. I can still see the shards of some of my most treasured Santas. I have friends who still bring me a Santa ornament every year because they, too, had a tree that fell over in their Christmas pasts.

There are lots of things we laugh about now - the tree that came home from the farm with so many gaps in its branches that holes were drilled in the trunk for branches from the bottom. It took a whole lot of tinsel (remember tinsel?) to achieve a Christmas effect that year.

We laugh now, when we look at the decoupaged (remember decoupage?) photos from a long line of kid Christmas cards. We laugh now because we forget the hassles - the “No, look this way!’’ the “For heaven sakes, smile!’’ and the inevitable “Just one more,’’ that accompanied the photo shoots.

There they are. The little ones making Christmas cookies, carrying out the Christmas tree from Mrs. Nielsen’s tree farm off Chanate Road, toting packages bought and wrapped at Rosenberg’s through Courthouse Square, and - my personal favorite - the pair of them, in choir robes, singing from a book of carols.

Only those of us who were there remember that the 7-year-old boy was singing, very loudly, “I want to go home!’’ But he was smiling.

Chances are, if asked, I will tell again the story about my Aunt Rose and the fur coat.

I was staying with her family at their Sacramento home while my father was in the hospital. It was 1942, wartime, and things were tight, but Uncle Tony was a contractor and reasonably well off. Aunt Rose was a great lady with a gift of laughter. In later years (she lived to be 100), I looked forward to visiting her because she never lost her sense of humor.

But she lost it that Christmas morning.

I should add that she was one of those people (you know who you are) who rattled and poked at packages, trying to determine what was in the boxes addressed to her under the tree.

Her soldier son, her teenage daughter, her husband, all of us, teased her about this trait, but we didn’t dissuade her. She was on the prowl. And there was a big box at the back of the tree that occupied her attentions for the week before Christmas.

She was sure, she told me in private, that it was the fur coat that she had been hinting for and she could hardly wait to try it on.

Came Christmas morn, she pulled the wraps off that package first. And, lo and behold, it was a Mix Master.

Then I was witness to something I had never seen - my jolly, teasing, happy aunt weeping copious tears. She took to her bedroom, sobbing, and told my uncle to go away and leave her alone.

Eventually, she emerged, but it took her several hours to get back up to speed and - after talking it over with her when she was in her 80s; I dared not mention it earlier - she admitted that, although she got her fur coat the next Christmas, she never really enjoyed the Mix Master.

Finally, scientists who study memory say that the olfactory glands, the sense of smell, are the most evocative of our senses. Which would account for what comes rushing back to me when I smell a candy cane.

My mother had a dear old friend. They were teenagers together when my mother first arrived in this country from the Azores. Her name was Angelina, we called her Ange, and she and her husband, who was a distant cousin of our family, owned a candy factory in San Francisco.

In the years when my mother and I were alone (between fathers, as it were) when my brother was off at war and my sister was married and living in San Francisco, we would visit my sister - and my Sacramento Aunt Rose, who now had a fur coat - at the holidays.

Like John, who finally got into the spirit of this memory thing, I recall the wonder of San Francisco at Christmas - of the giant tree that stretched to the rotunda of the City of Paris (which he knew always came from a ranch in Occidental), of the toy department at O’Connor & Moffat, of the animated Christmas windows at all the stores.

But, coming back to this candy cane business, we never went to San Francisco without a visit to Ange at the candy factory on Sansome Street.

Enveloped in a large white apron, she would greet us with a sticky embrace, and before she and my mother settled down to “visit,’’ I got the obligatory tour of the factory.

The name, which was not their name but the founders’, was Hromada Candy and they made that hard sugar candy people called Christmas candy in those days - much of it red- and white-striped.

The tour was right out of “Willy Wonka,’’ without the chocolate. The machines that looked like cement mixers, the baking ovens, the assembly line with rows of women in white hats and rubber gloves breaking the hot candy into pieces. And the smell - vanilla and peppermint and fruit jelly - all mixed up with a strong overlay of powdered sugar.

She would send us away with at least 10 pounds of candy, all wrapped up in a sturdy brown paper package, and we would wrestle it onto the bus and home to Humboldt County where, as I remember, we gave most of it away to friends.

While I always looked forward to our visits to the factory, it was all too much for me. I don’t remember that I ever ate any of that candy - except, politely, when she handed me a piece from the conveyor. To this day, I love the smell of candy canes.

But I really don’t want to eat one.