Guest column/Looking back at Christmas Eve on 1933
In the era of President-elect Donald J. Trump, many remain anxious about the coming new year. The nation’s capital is seen from the heartland like a 21st century Sodom and Gomorrah. But a step back in time captured in the 1971 TV Christmas special “The Homecoming,” set in the Great Depression on Christmas Eve 1933, introduced viewers to a family called the Waltons, with a brood of youngins including the oldest, John Boy, who aspired to be a newspaper writer, and the youngest of the boys wearing knickers sharing a story about squeezing a little duck.
When families gathered to watch the radio, which carried comedy shows like “Fibber Magee and Molly,” which premiered in April 1936 on NBC radio, only a Grinch would tell the Walton family, which was filled with the spirit of the holiday and seen laughing in 1933 at the Christmas Eve special on the radio, it is not possible, and the Fireside Chats of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the 32nd president who campaigning in 1932 in Wheeling, Wellsburg, Follansbee and Steubenville against America’s involvement in foreign wars.
The country had been rocked by the stock market crash of 1929 and the banking crisis that followed the economic downturn. Hoovervilles dotted almost every large town, and a soup kitchen line stretched around every city block. Hobo’s rode the rails.
As FDR led the country in these dark days, he could reflect on his boyhood and time spent at family Christmases at Springwood, his family’s estate in Hyde Park, N.Y.
The family had several sleighs — including one bobsled he enjoyed riding as a teenager — for when snow covered the roads. He enjoyed sledding down a large hill in front of their home with his cousins, the Delano’s.
I am quick to identify with the spinster’s bootleg Baldwin sisters, Mamie and Emily, who always pined for her lost love, Ashley Longworth, waiting for him to return one day, while making the judge’s recipe and still clinging to a belief in Santa Claus. I still hang a stocking over the mantelpiece each year, but like the sisters, but since my parents passed some time back, he does not seem to pay a visit anymore.
I spent most of last Christmas searching for reindeer tracks on my rooftop. I will be up before first light this year certain I will find some.
The innocence of the children on Walton’s Mountain that Christmas Eve now so long ago was on full display, unaware of the dangers that lurked in the future brought about by the onset of World War II.
Recently, a lady speculated that today is like the 1930s. Mark Twain said “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.” FDR was commander-in-chief for 12 Christmases, the last 80 years ago this Dec. 25. He spent 10 at the White House and the last two at Hyde Park where he delivered his Christmas message to a nation at war in 1944 as the Battle of Bulge was waged on snow-covered frozen war front Europe.
In 1941, Winston Churchill spent Christmas Eve with Roosevelt at the White House. He spoke at the lighting of the Christmas Tree following FDR dedicating the night to children: “Make the children happy in a world of storm.”
If this is the 1930s being replayed again, then, to paraphrase Churchill, let’s make the children happy this Christmas, for a world at war waits for them.
I read somewhere this Christmas season that what is behind us is so little and what is in front of us so little but what is inside us is so much greater.
Find the greatest inside, as Whitney Houston sang — find your strength in love.
Leave your figure skaters tracing figures on the ice this holiday season.
Is anyone up for a sleigh ride with a couple of old Bootleggers in search of my daddy? Let it snow!
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year 1934.
(Traubert is a resident of Wellsburg)