"Christmas," an Irishman once said, "is for family. St. Stephen's Day [December 26th] is for friends." In fact, much of Europe still celebrates The Twelve Days of Christmas from December 25th to January 5th, the eve of the Epiphany, which marks the arrival of the Magi in Bethlehem. The festivities, many derived from folk traditions and ancient yuletide customs, entail Christmas Masses, creche displays, parades, caroling, Christmas markets, and saints' days. Revelers indulge in seasonal foods and gaze in awe at the holiday lights adorning houses and public spaces everywhere. Here in America, though, we seem to have forsaken most of those hoary rituals of The Twelve Days of Christmas.
As the shadows lengthened on Christmas day when I was a child in The Bronx, by late afternoon the celebration was always tinged, for me, with a bittersweet realization that with the encroaching darkness, this day that we had so long anticipated was drawing to an abrupt conclusion. From the slow foreshadowing weeks of Advent that prepared us to welcome the birth of the Christ child, to the hopeful expectation of Santa's bounty, the Christmas season itself was drawing now with cold finality to an end. By the next day, Christmas would be over.
Like many Christian families, we'd leave the Nativity set up until the feast of the Epiphany on January 6th. But by then, any feasting would have been over for nearly two weeks, and Christmas was just a memory. No matter how frequently we had watered the tree—always a real one in those days—the branches would be brittle, their needles dropping like rain at the slightest touch. So we stripped it of its tinsel and decorations and discarded the tree to the curb in the days after Christmas.
In one final farewell to the season, the older kids in the neighborhood would drag into the gutter some of the cast off trees from the pile beside the garbage cans on the sidewalk. As darkness settled on Tiebout Avenue, the heap would be set alight in the empty space by the fire hydrant outside our building. The trees would catch with the flick of a match, their dry branches flaring and snapping as the wind fed the fire and the pile blazed beneath the lampposts. As the fire roared, the scent of burning balsam mixed with smoke in the crisp sharp winter air.
Some of the more daring kids darted about the flaming trees and we could see the fire reflected in their eyes. Others tied steel wool pads to ropes, lit them in the fire, and swung them over their heads in a swirling spectacle of street theatrics. Of course, the fire would eventually burn through to the ropes and launch steel wool missiles into a low orbit that added to the fearless performance and scattered many in the crowd of kids who had gathered to watch the amazing display. As the fire died down, the older kids would feed more discarded trees onto the pile, which flared anew. On some nights the F.D.N.Y. would arrive, sirens blaring, to hose down the flaming trees. Most nights, though, they were busy dousing pyres on other streets, and our burning of the green blazed on. After what seemed hours, the flames would peak. Soon the whoosh of the fire subsided and the crackling sap sizzled and popped until it faded to a whisper and eventually went out.
Of course, for kids in The Bronx—as no doubt for kids all over the City—the burning of the green was sheer frolicsome fun. Yet in looking back now more than six decades later, I realize that, unwittingly, the flaming trees were our urban version of the bonfires that blaze to this day in rituals throughout Europe, which originated to ward off evil spirits amidst the darkness of winter. The fire symbolically represented the demise of the old year and the birth of the new, mere days away. But it was for us just one of the many street rituals that marked the changing of the seasons in our neighborhood of New York City in the 1950s and '60s: stickball in spring and summer; street games galore on mild days; spinning tops, chestnut fights, and street hockey in fall; and snowball fights, sledding, and the burning of the green in winter. The cycle had come round once again, and the blazing trees reminded us that Christmas was less than a year away.
