Mack Williams
For the Salisbury Post
When I was a child, my father, brother Joe and I would make our way into the woods behind our house to cut down a Christmas tree. Our tree of choice was always cedar. The “cedar smell” is so appealing to most people and I liked it as well, but my particular preference for cedar was not in its smell, but in its depth.
Most people like pine and fraser firs, but those choices have no imagination, because one can see through them. When lights are hung on them, they might light the particular branch upon which they are hung, but they also light up the bare wall behind them, which is thoroughly visible in an unimaginative pine or fir.
When a string of lights has been placed in a cedar and brought to illumination, the cedar’s greater depth is evident. Each bulb becomes a light in a little cavern, the floor and roof of the cavern being the adjacent illuminated cedar branches, and the darkness beyond being the unexplored depths of the cave, which seems to fit more the mystery of Christmas Eve than plastered walls radiantly and wastefully lit through sparse, skeletal branches.
The W.T. Grant Christmas party
My mother, Lorraine Williams, worked many years at W.T.Grant Company on South Main Street in Salisbury. As far as I can remember, this memory came from 1956.
The W.T.Grant Christmas party for the staff was held at the Salisbury Moose Lodge. In addition to the dinner, there was a live band playing rock -and -roll music. I was 5 years old then, and the only thing that made an impression on me was that the guitarists had tape around the ends of their playing fingers.
What that said to me was, “In making music, one must be careful, or one might get hurt”.
‘Four and Twenty Blackbirds’
One Christmas morning when I was only four or five years old, I looked under the tree and found a present which became one of my favorites in those young years. It was a pie made of metal with little metal blackbirds inside.
The metal pie was also a music box. When a crank was turned, the song “Four-and Twenty Blackbirds” would be played, and following the last note of the song, several metal-fashioned bird heads would pop out from a series of circular trap doors atop the crust of the metal pie.
I don’t remember what became of it, as it was one of my earlier toys. The house where I grew up was on the Old Concord Road.
Lately the things that were buried in the old refuse and brush pile in my old back yard seem to be rising to the surface, as evidenced by my friends, Charlie and Pam who live there now. If the music box is buried there, and if one day, a crank appears out of the soil, whoever turns that crank may see little metal birds popping out of the ground into the sunlight again.
Bernhardt Hardware
One store front in Salisbury always stood out, especially at Christmastime: Bernhardt Hardware.
Lots of other store windows were decorated with garlands and lights, some of which would flash on and off, but they were static in nature, just things blinking in place. At Bernhardt’s most of the store window was in motion. There was a Santa Claus rising out of a chimney, a snowman in motion, reindeer in motion, trains, trucks, etc.
The larger displays had the look of being handmade, giving the impression that the owner of Bernhardt’s was very handy with the tools that he sold. I remember always thinking that in this window was “big city stuff at Christmas,” what might be seen in storefronts in New York.
Every year, around Thanksgiving, the Salisbury Christmas parade known as the Holiday Caravan was held (although I have been away many years, I am sure it still is). If you had failed to attend the parade, with its floats and bands, you could still make a trip to the sidewalk in front of Bernhardt Hardware and be amazed.
Snowflake spiders
In the early 1960s, I was always getting science-oriented presents at Christmas, such as telescopes, binoculars, and chemistry sets. One impression of the snows of the early ’60s I always remember: my mother is ironing and my father is in the living room, reading the paper.
I had been playing with a junior chemistry set and paused, walking over to the window to watch the snow. I would look outward and upward to one individual snowflake, following it’s downward slow fall. Against some already brightening clouds, it had the look of a tiny little gray spider descending to the earth, turning white when it joined the great multitude of all of the other little gray spiders which had fallen, none now being distinguishable from the other.
Mack Williams grew up in Rowan County and now lives in Danville, Va.