Join
The Best lists have started.
Best books of 2020. Best movies of 2020. Best TV shows. A tradition as much a part of New Year’s as the ball dropping in Times Square.
My Best list this year is of memories.
Subscribe and get unlimited access to our online magazine archive.
High on the list is a Best from a recent Christmas season.
Several years ago I decided that I could not do a Christmas tree that year, much as putting up and trimming a Christmas tree meant to me. I had managed to do it myself long after my father who always did it had passed. My mother helped place the ornaments by sitting nearby and observing bunches or holes in the placement. I would take my metal stand to the Christmas tree lot and ask the man if he would put the tree I bought in the stand and deliver it to me. He would, and set it up in the designated spot. But that year I’d suffered some financial setbacks and decided I could not afford it. Or, perhaps, simply wasn’t in the full Christma
Subscribe and get unlimited access to our online magazine archive.
I’m 94, so I remember lots of Christmases. The Christmas of 1944 was the one in which the merry was strained through a kind of holiday sieve. My father had suffered a heart attack the previous month. He had survived but was still bedridden, and doctors thought he might never work again. So I’d dropped out of the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University and, the following Monday, headed for the Chicago Daily News Building in hopes of getting a job as a copygirl. I did.
And I found myself, a former journalism major, in the heart the city room of the