In mid-December I recorded a Christmas cassette tape of
the children for my sister. Paul and James sang the songs they had learned at
the asilo, they talked for a few minutes about their life in Italy, and
they asked her when she was coming to see them. Margaret Ann and Matthew didn’t
speak well and were more interested in playing with the microphone than
speaking into it, but I managed to capture a few fleeting words as they helped
me read a book. As I listen to that tape today, I am struck by how much Paul and
James speak English with a strong Italian accent. They were supposed to speak
only English around the house, so they had daily practice, but in a few short
months they had slipped into Italian syntax when they spoke English (e.g. “a bicycle
red,” instead of “a red bicycle”), and their vowels and consonant sounds were
Italian. As George was collecting the boys at preschool one day, the father of
Paul’s best friend stopped him. He asked if he could drop his son off at our
house to play, so that the boy would pick up English. George told him that it would be a waste of
time. When Paul and James played together, they slipped automatically into
Italian. I was torn between stopping them so they wouldn’t forget English, and
encouraging them so they would reinforce their Italian. On the cassette tape,
one of them uses a word and they argue in rapid Italian about which word is correct.
It is obvious, listening to the exchange, that they were much more comfortable
in Italian than English. Given another year, I venture to guess they would have
forgotten English almost completely. We learned, as have many immigrant
families in America, that the push/pull of the mother tongue and the new one is
difficult to negotiate.
When we next went to Casale, we saw very few
decorations for sale, and those that we found were expensive. After seven
months of living on our savings our funds were low, so we got creative. One
Sunday afternoon in mid-December George and I took all of the children down to
the garage. We helped them cut out shapes from pieces of aluminum foil, then
twisted the tops into hooks to hang on the tree. Then they colored traditional
pictures of Santa, the reindeer, and presents, and cut them out. Next George
directed them to draw random shapes, color them, and cut them out also. In the
tops of all of these we punched holes and threaded them with red and green and yellow
yarn. George tied two sticks in a cross, and the children helped him wind blue
yarn back and forth around the sticks, so that it formed a diamond shape. Then
they glued a small plastic baby “Jesus” in the center. That was our
tree-topper. A few days later we gathered and painted pine cones in different colors to
substitute for colored ornaments. In her Christmas box, my sister had sent
candy canes and small, red, net stockings containing chocolate coins that we
could hang for more color. The collection of decorations wasn’t as lavish as in
the past, but it was enough. I didn’t ask how the Italians of that area
decorated for Christmas, because I knew only what I wanted to do for my family.
A few days before
Christmas, George went out with his father and they cut down a small fir tree. When they arrived home, they anchored it in a bucket of dirt, brought it upstairs, and placed it on
one side of the carpet in our living room. The next afternoon we helped the excited children hang their
homemade decorations on our very own Italian Christmas tree. They clapped and critiqued and exclaimed and cheered, their eyes alight with joy. And when we were finished, it looked as lovely as any of our trees, before or since.
After we settled the children in bed that evening, I took stock of our home. We
had moved the dining room set from the center to one side of the large main room. The
carpet, a red Persian-style which went well with the couch we had bought from
Piero, covered most of the remaining floor space. On it we had placed the
couch, George's birthday rocking chair, and our Christmas tree. Except for the lack of a
television, it looked much like the living rooms that I had known all of my
life. In the middle of northern Italy we had created a little oasis of comfort
for ourselves.
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