It was the Christmas of 1956. I was 11 years old, and two years earlier our family had moved to Northern Minnesota from Merrill New York, a little town in the Northern Adirondacks where time seems to stand still. My father’s family was from Merrill, in fact my grandmother was a Merrill. Their namesake founded the town way back when. Somewhere along the line, my father, his brothers and all the cousins learned how to play instruments. They must have contracted the musical gene somewhere. At any rate while I was growing up back in New York, many was the night that I sat up in bed listening to dad and the relatives laugh & play music downstairs. It’s one of those childhood memories that still gives me those warm fuzzies all these years later. Naturally they formed a band and played all over the area. They did everything from old standards to square dances. Dad used to do the calling. A strange language to a kid. I could never quite figure out what a dosie doe was. When we moved to Minnesota, that was the end of the band and the end of those nights listening to laughter & music laying in bed pretending to be asleep. We moved because Dad had been laid off his job. The decision to move to Minnesota was a hard one on all of us. To my mother, it felt like we were moving to the end of the earth. But Northern Minnesota was going through a boom with the taconite industry taking off, and so jobs were offered to a lot of folks in our area.
There was no bigger fan of Christmas than Dad. I remember my sister and myself trudging for miles up the side of a mountain back in New York in knee deep snow one Christmas because dad had found a tree there while he was deer hunting earlier in the fall, and we had to get it for our Christmas tree. Dad was like a kid at Christmas, playing Santa and fooling my sister and me, delighting in our surprise when “Santa” would bring us that special thing that we had asked for.
And so it was in 1956 that Mom had arranged a special surprise for Dad. My sister and I only learned about it on Christmas Eve as a large box was delivered to our house all wrapped in Christmas paper. Normally we didn’t open any presents on Christmas Eve, and yet mom kept insisting that this mystery box be opened. Dad balked, holding to the tradition that we had to wait for Christmas morning. Yet Mom was insistent. I had rarely seen Mom be so assertive. It just wasn’t like her. And it was because of that insistence that she eventually won over my sister and me. So now it was Dad against the rest of us. To break tradition and open a present… it wasn’t even labeled. Who was it for? Reluctantly Dad finally gave in and told us kids to open it. Again, Mom persisted and insisted that Dad open it.
For Dad, the holy grail of guitars was a Martin D-28, and as it dawned on him that what he was unwrapping was exactly that, you could almost feel his heart stop. That Christmas eve the music returned to our house and for the following hours as Dad played every Christmas song he ever knew, everything seemed to be exactly as it was supposed to be. So whenever anyone asks “what was your favorite Christmas?” I’m immediately back in 1956 listening to Dad singing Winter Wonderland with his brand new Martin guitar.
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