Moving to Italy: Christmas morning

On Christmas Eve George and I stuffed four of his socks with little gifts for the children and the usual mini-snacks: this time a tangerine, banana, and foil-wrapped soft cheese. When they were fully asleep we placed these stockings at the foot of their beds, following the tradition of my English family. The next morning we could hear them rummaging around in their stockings and knew that the toys and fruit and cheese would be enough to keep them from invading our early morning lie-in.

Christmas at Gabi was quiet, but with plenty of gifts for the children from my sister, my aunt, their grandparents, and us. Our gifts were modest, just a book each and a small toy—cars for the boys and puzzles for the twins. They were delighted with everything, as children of that age usually are. They were excited just with the act of opening the colorfully wrapped packages. We had spent much of the previous day helping my in-laws make ravioli for our Christmas dinner. Zio Silvio and Zio Remo joined us at the appointed time, around 1pm.  We ate, we drank, and we sent good thoughts to those not with us.

We had tried to call my sister and her husband on Christmas Eve late in the afternoon.  We had dressed the children warmly and driven to Montaldo along the back road. It was a dirt track that was fine during the dry summer, but since there was a fifty-foot drop on one side and a hillside on the other, it was dangerous in the fog. I was very nervous as we crept along, barely able to see the road in front of the car. When we got to the café/bar we entered the telephone booth and placed our call. The operator said that we would have to wait because the circuits were very busy. I had warned my sister we would call, and I knew she’d be expecting it. We waited for over two hours, sipping soft drinks and trying to keep the children happy, but we could not get through. At dinnertime, with the fog getting thicker, we cancelled the call. On Christmas Day we tried again after the family meal, with the same results. I was disappointed and I knew that she would be too, but we decided to try again at New Years.  

Margaret Ann eating her cheese

Matthew trying to open the foil on his cheese

James digging through his stocking

Paul playing with a car from the stocking

The boys attacking the presents under our tree

Marino showing the ravioli he and Rina had made and cooked for our Christmas dinner

 

Moving to Italy: Christmas--Part 3

Just before Christmas, the asilo put on a play. George and I, with the children on our laps, squeezed into the car with my in-laws in the early darkness of a December night and drove to the asilo. Paul and James had been practicing their parts in the play and singing the songs for a month or more. They didn’t seem nervous. To them it was just another opportunity to play with their friends. We arrived, dropped off the older boys with one of the nuns at the main entrance, and walked with the twins and my in-laws to the little room with the stage. It was crowded with other parents. I didn’t know any of them, and George knew just a few, but they nodded and mumbled polite greetings to us and to my in-laws who made their way to the front. I could feel the other parents' curious stares as George and I sat in the back of the hall with Margaret Ann and Matthew balanced on our knees, close to the exit in case they made noise. The school had an enrollment of about twenty-five students, so there were plenty of parents and grandparents in the audience, but not too many other little kids. Eventually it dawned on me that in this area of single children, most of the little preschoolers had no brothers or sisters. No wonder the parents stared!

The lights dimmed, the curtain rose, and I held my breath with pride as Paul led the single line of little Italian children onto the stage. I spotted James in the middle. My little American boys fit right in! Each boy on the stage carried a small, carved wooden rifle, which I thought inappropriate for Christmas, but then I was a stranger, what did I know? They marched together like little soldiers then stopped and recited something. Paul seemed to be the soldier in charge. He had a major speaking part, in which I understood only every fourth word, but he spoke with energy and expression. When he finished everyone laughed and cheered, and I was just another proud parent, smiling and watching and nervous, and willing him to do well. Each child recited something, even our shy James. The nuns had taught them to shout out their lines, so we could hear every word in the back row, even if I couldn’t understand them. All the parents clapped loudly, and Margaret Ann and Matthew who had been quietly watching laughed and clapped with them. Next, while one of the nuns played the piano, the children lined up across the stage and sang the songs that the boys had been practicing around the house for weeks. Listening to the voices of all the children singing together reminded me of my first Christmas in Canada when our children’s choir sang for our parents in a small hall just like that one. The same aura of peace and joy that I had felt as we sang in Canada surrounded us as we listened in Italy. After the finale, a man stood up (the mayor?) and congratulated everyone on a job well done. The audience clapped and cheered, and then they threw candies at the stage, showering the little children as they dived around, squealing and laughing and gathering as many as they could. 

The warm feeling that night was the same as in so many other Christmas concerts, in so many other parts of the world. But for me, the feeling was tinged with strangeness. I had just watched my children march and recite, and I was left far, far out of it. I had no idea what the little play represented. Their voices, which I knew so well, spoke words that I didn’t understand and that worried me. Paul was only five and half, and James almost four. If I couldn’t understand them at that young age, how could I expect to follow where they went in the years ahead?  All of my diligent studying of the Italian language had yielded very poor results, and yet the children seemed able to glide in and scoop up the language without effort, leaving me far behind. But as we drove home that night I praised them and laughed with them and hoped I would eventually catch up.

Moving to Italy: Christmas, Part 2

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.

Moving to Italy: Christmas—Part 1

December reminded us of Christmas, and Christmas reminded us of family. We wanted to send greetings to all of our family and friends in England, Canada and the States, so we drove to Casale to look for Christmas cards. The ones we found were written in Italian, but the pictures and the sentiment needed no translation. That Christmas would be our first one without my sister, and throughout that December and January memories of other holidays haunted me.

When we moved to Italy, I brought along my entire collection of family photographs.  Some were housed in albums, and some were loose. I had inherited the entire collection of black and white photographs that my mother had inherited from her mother, and I treasured them as she had. My mother had packed them in the trunk when we moved from England to Canada and from Canada to California. I packed those same photographs along with my own into that same trunk and took them to Italy. Sometimes, on a rainy afternoon, we spread them out on the dining room table. I went around the collection naming the people in the black and white images. The children preferred pictures of people they knew, and laughed at the one of my sister and me in Toronto posing with my dog in front of our Christmas tree

 

  In the same way, I found great joy in looking at photos of younger versions of my grandparents, my aunts and uncles, and my mother. I hung my sister’s framed wedding picture on the wall in my bedroom, so that the children would remember the aunt and uncle who sent letters and gifts—and peanut butter—from California. I also displayed pictures of my mother on my dresser. None of the children had known her, but it was very important to me that they knew the woman in the picture holding baby Paul, was my mother and their grandmother who had died just a few days after Paul’s first Christmas.  

We were surprised to find that Christmas was a very low-key holiday in Italy of 1971. When we bought our Christmas cards in Casale, there was no sign of Santa waiting to greet children (with the requisite photo op). There were neither snowmen nor elves decorating the shop windows, and the streets were not lined with colored lights and fake trees. The focus seemed to be more on the religious aspect of the holiday rather than the secular. At the asilo the boys were preparing a show for the parents, and I looked forward to the first celebration of the season. 

However, we had a connection with many different rituals and routines, and as we looked through the photographs of Christmases past, the boys became excited and wanted to reproduce what they saw and vaguely remembered: a decorated tree with presents underneath delivered by a mysterious Santa who came riding a sleigh at night. They eagerly agreed to making Christmas lists—Paul writing and James dictating. Margaret Ann and Matthew had no idea of what we were all on about but echoed the words they heard the boys repeating: Santa, present, treeee! We wanted to celebrate Christmas as usual, but George and I found we had to compromise and improvise to create a holiday like the ones we had known. First up was the tree.