One December Sunday many years ago, when I was home on leave from the Army, Mom, God rest her soul, was cooking a wonderful dinner for us all. When dinner was just about ready to serve, she called us all to the table. Dad in the meantime, had put the Advent wreath on the table, and had lit some candles on the wreath. Before dinner, Dad recited some Advent prayers to God, and finished with this impromptu prayer while we were all gathered around:
“Remember those who have gone before us,
those who founded our people,
who gave our people the gift of faith in God,
who gave us the gift of strong character.”
This is one of my favorite memories of Dad, God rest his soul. He was a big, blunt World War Two veteran who was a real man in every sense of the word. “Remember those who have gone before us.”
We have seen pictures of our parents and grandparents when they were young people. We have heard the family stories our old ones have told.
Kev and Bry, Christmas 1961
I was fortunate enough to have a great-great aunt old enough to remember Teddy Roosevelt as a young president when she was a young bride, and with a good enough mind to remember the stories her father had told her about his time as a soldier under the command of General Sherman in the Civil War, and she would share these with us. I also had the good fortune of having a grandfather who remembered and spoke often of his childhood days in Ireland and his rowdier days as a teenager on the streets of Chicago. Our family cherishes these memories and the pictures and other mementos Aunt Albie, Grandpa Charlie, and our other ancestors have left us.
History is not a collection of statistics or dry facts, but of stories. History is a STORY … or more correctly, MANY STORIES that make up an overall truth.
CHRISTMAS AT ELLIS ISLAND
Christmas at Ellis Island was often a sad day for the immigrants and would-be immigrants, because those on Ellis Island were often there against their will. And of course, these people missed their extended families and friends in the home country.
Some were being treated in the Island’s hospital. Many were being detained for a legal matter or were awaiting being discharged or being claimed by family or spouse, or awaiting the recovery of a loved one in the hospital. And some poor souls were awaiting deportation.
The authorities at Ellis Island did try to make Christmas as festive as they could for the immigrants. They also used the Christmas festival as a gentle way to aid in assimilation of immigrants to American customs.
Barry Moreno, a National Park Service historian at the Ellis Island Immigration Museum, shared the following information about Christmases at Ellis Island in his excellent book Encyclopedia of Ellis Island and his monograph Christmases at Ellis Island:
Christmas at Ellis Island
Many priests and ministers from the various ethnic communities of the New York City area came to perform religious services for the Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant immigrants in their native languages. The priests and ministers also did their best to console those facing deportation.
The Registry Room (also known as the Great Hall), a huge auditorium-sized room that occupied the center of the second floor of the Main Building of Ellis Island, was the site of most of the Christmas festivities. A huge Christmas tree and a huge American flag and many smaller decorations adorned the massive hall, which was almost a half-acre in size. Sometimes there could be as many as 2000 aliens present for the Christmas service at Ellis Island. The deportees were welcome to these celebrations, along with those other detainees not in the hospital.
Robert Watchorn, one of Theodore Roosevelt’s Commissioners of Immigration at Ellis Island, and an immigrant from England himself, presided over one such service in 1905 and ensured “My Country ‘Tis of Thee” was sung. In 1914, Anthony Caminetti, the Labor Department’s overall immigration chief, came up from the nation’s capital for Christmas, and the staffers provided a concert and a silent movie show.
The Christmas festival always included speeches, singing of carols in various languages, and gift-giving to the immigrants. For those who were too ill to attend, the hospital staffers threw them a Christmas party in the hospital’s Service Room. “Father Christmas” personally came to visit the sick boys and girls, bearing them presents.
Ludmilla Foxlee, in her work How They Came: The Drama of Ellis Island (pages 7-8), remembered the following about Christmases on Ellis Island:
Christmas was regularly observed on the island. Missionary societies sent toys and fruit for the children. The General Committee of Immigrant Aid decided to buy small, useful articles for adults, so that everyone could have a Christmas gift. An appeal was made for bags about 18 by 18 inches with a draw string at the top, made of bright cotton prints. Girls’ bags contained a doll, a towel, washcloth, and soap, a game, a toy set of dishes, three handkerchiefs, a writing tablet, a pencil box, and a pair of stockings. Women received a sewing bag, needles and thread, pins and safety pins, scissors and buttons, a bead necklace, an apron, a bath towel and washcloth, toothbrush and toothpaste, soap, a writing tablet and pencil, stockings, and three handkerchiefs.
For men the bags contained a comfort bag (with needles, thread, some buttons, et cetera) a safety razor, toothbrush, toothpaste, pins, safety pins, washcloth and soap, a towel, a writing tablet and pencil, a pair of socks, and three handkerchiefs. For boys, the bags were similar to those for the girls, with a game substituted for the doll.
A Christmas tree with lights and a silver star brightened the hall. Benches in long rows with an aisle in the middle accommodated the detained. Chairs at the side of the hall were for the General Committee of Immigrant Aid and their friends. A musical program occupied the major part of the afternoon, and the talent was donated. For two successive Christmases, a group of the Social Service workers appeared in national costumes and sang English, Italian, German, Polish, Spanish, and Czechoslovak Christmas carols.
However, the Commissioner decided later that professional talent must be provided. He persuaded a broadcasting company to present a musical program, and that one was heard coast to coast.
The radio company provided a full orchestra and a Metropolitan Opera soprano to sing a Puccini aria. The grandeur had no visible effect on the audience. Probably they were thinking of home and loved ones. After the program, the immigrants were given their bags and an orange.
Jews and other non-Christians on Ellis Island of course could not in good conscience celebrate Christmas as a religious holiday. Jewish immigrant societies tended to Jewish detainees’ religious needs on Hanukkahs. However, the non-Christian aliens on Ellis Island got gifts at Christmas and were welcome to the Christmas festivals just like the Christian aliens were.
Bear in mind most immigrants in the Ellis Island Era were practicing Catholics. And most American government officials in that era were churchgoing Protestants. Nowadays, the ACLU and the Freedom From Religion pissants would go into Grinch mode and sue to prevent such festivities on a federal installation.
CHRISTMAS WITH THE POLKA KING
I was on the road to Bethlehem one Sunday a couple of days before Christmas. Unlike St. Joseph, I was driving a Dodge truck to Bethlehem PA for an engineering project. I had written a technical manual for a company’s chemical plant and we needed to do some testing. I-80 flashes thru Pennsylvania’s Appalachians, and the radio reception is not good. I would get ethnic stations for about a county, and then they would fade. Polka music on Sunday afternoon mostly. The Polish Hour. Croatian tunes. Little Slovakia. Hungarian Folk Hour. Polka music is Eastern Europe’s Catholics counterpart to country music. Like Cajun music in Luzianne. Or Irish music, which is the father of American country music. At any rate, I heard this recitation by Frankie Yankovic on the radio, and I had to pull over because I clouded up.
Here is Frankie’s recitation:
“I remember years ago when I was just a little boy laying awake in my room waiting for Christmas. I didn’t think about toys very much ‘cause I knew Mom and Dad didn’t have very much money. Mom rented rooms to boarders from the old country. And as the holiday grew near they would all become kind of sad thinking about their wives and sweethearts they left far behind in their homeland. Then before you knew it, they’d start singing and drinking some of our homemade wine and listening to the old button accordion. Christmas Eve was special because Mom and Dad would let us (kids) stay up late so we could all go to Midnight Mass. The best memories of all were waking up on Christmas morning to the smell of the great holiday dishes that only Mom could make. Even though I’m fortunate enough to buy all that I can for my children and grandchildren, thinking back, I know that I remember the true meaning of my Christmases long long ago.”
Frank Yankovic’s parents were immigrants from Slovenia. He grew up in the Cleveland area, started his band “The Yanks” and ran a successful bar, all before World War Two. Frank joined the U.S. Army and earned a Purple Heart while fighting in the Battle of the Bulge.
He pressed his own records and sold them at gigs. When Frank became well-known, Columbia Records execs offered him a recording contract. Frank kept them from dictating to him what to record; he recorded songs he believed in and made himself, his band, and them a lot of money.
The story Frank told about Christmas he made into a recitation in the middle of the song “Silent Night.” Singers sang the first verse of the carol, then Frank told his anecdote, then the singers resumed. It is on his 1984 album “Christmas Memories.” Frank’s widow Ida allowed me to reprint the recitation in my book “Ellis Island Scrapbook” and she was wonderful in talking with me about Frank.
Again, God’s blessings to you all, and thanks and adoration to the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit this joyous day! And a special Hanukkah blessing for my Jewish readers!
SHERLOCK JUSTICE
WE CAN SHOW YOU HOW TO BE YOUR OWN DETECTIVE.
