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 This story written by Richard Atcheson is a part of our Heritage Stories. Storied like this we want to share with you since they will probably get lost in these digital times. He shares with you a Christmas he spent in Germany years ago.
A Peanut-Butter Christmas
When I was a child, my younger brother ate an Unique Christmas Ornaments that was dangling from our tree. He bled a lot from the mouth, and had to be snatched away and repaired. He was not spanked because it was Christmas morning, but I was aware that all the adults were unsettled by what he had done.
It made near-perfect sense to me then and does now. Nothing looks more delicious to a child, nothing says "Eat Me!" half so yummity smackeroo as the sumptuous Tannenbaum. The Germans, who invented it, well know it.
The best tree I ever saw was in Germany, a long time ago, when I was bleakly in the Army there and went to stay for Christmas with friends in Rothenburg. They were desperately poor and hungry in the war's aftermath and were just barely getting by in their 15th-century stone-cold house on the Herrngasse. I used to ship those canned goods and peanut butter from the PX, and they declared that the peanut butter, which they had never encountered before, was the best food that they had ever tasted. It was also, of course, a rare and invaluable source of protein for their two small children.
On Christmas Eve I drove to Rothenburg on icy roads, over miles of flinty, open fields, through the medieval gates of tiny, lightless villages, through miles of white, sepulchral forests, more brilliant than the night, until at last my carload of American excess rattled on the cobbles of the Herrngasse.
In their main receiving room, a room rarely used and then barely heated by an antique porcelain stove, they had put up a Christmas Decorations Ideas tree the likes of which I had never seen, loaded with Miscellaneous Holiday Ornaments and decked on every branch with a fat white candle in a Christmas decorations silvery holder. Near midnight, just before they woke Angelika and Mattias, they lighted all the Battery Candles and brought the children in to see.
I understood in those tiny children's faces what the magic of Christmas really is. The astonishment of the golden candlelight Christmas decorations transformed the room and all of us in it; the warm, quivering flames cast a glow from the fresh green boughs that was holy, hopeful, and wildly improbable with promise in a time of little, of almost nothing, of potatoes and peanut butter. That is the Artificial Prelit Christmas Trees. That is Christmas. Or at least that is what it was, then, in that long-ago time, in that very ancient house, when Christmas lunch tomorrow would feature, I knew, peanut butter soup.
As I live and weary of those who weary of our lives and our riches, I think back to that Christmas Eve and can weep again at the sight of the faces of Angelika and Mattias—children dependent upon me, an occupying soldier, for much of their protein—who saw beauty in the magic tree. I was embarrassed then and I am embarrassed now at my relative wealth.
We grown-ups watched the tree with them, and had a glass of wine, of which there was still enough. Then we put the candles out and went to our cold beds, where there were hot bricks in flannel waiting.
I put my sock-feet close around my hot brick and in the dark I thanked God that I could give something to those children, in that year of such desperate want; that I was allowed, in my time, to be more than a taker, with—at least-peanut butter.
Once upon a time my brother ate a Christmas decorations ornament because he loved it. I understand. Today, I could eat the whole tree.
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