A Christmas Hearth

Most of my childhood was spent in Allentown, NJ., a small town in central Jersey with a population of about 1,300. 

The downtown was charming, in a Mayberryish way. Two soda fountains, two corner stores, a bakery, a bank, a barber shop, a post office and a pharmacy. No bar. No restaurants. Lots of churches. The streets were lined with trees and old clapboard houses.

We didn’t live on one of those historic homes. We lived in a brick ranch house a few blocks away in what was referred to as, “The Development.”

Our development was modeled on the post World War II working-class housing experiment called Levittown. 

There were Levittowns in New York and Pennsylvania at that time. According to my mother, the biggest difference between our development and those was scale. Ours encompassed just a few blocks. And unlike those massive subdivisions, our houses didn’t come with built-in appliances.

Shoot, our house cost my parents $7,000. You didn’t get a refrigerator and a stove for that price.

As far as I knew none of the houses in our development had a fireplace, either.

Our lack of a fireplace bothered me. Especially at Christmas. Not only was there the question of how Santa would get in, there was the problem of where to hang our stockings.

Oh, my parents made up lame stories about Santa sliding in under the front door, or jimmying open a window. But those were idiotic explanations

Due to the lack of a mantle, my dad hammered nails into the frame under a living room window and we hung our stockings there. The toes touched the floor.

They looked sad.

This was not what families did on TV and in the movies. They stood on tiptoes to hang their stockings on massive wooden mantles while a fire roared in the hearth.

So perfect!

Every Christmas Eve one of my parents would read “The Night Before Christmas” and I’d stare at the illustrations of Santa emerging from the soot with the stockings hanging exactly where they belonged. I was filled with envy.

“Why don’t we have a fireplace?” I’d demand.

“Only rich people have those,” Dad would say.

I knew that wasn’t true. My aunt and uncle, who lived an hour away in a ranch house not much bigger than ours, had a fireplace. I loved to watch the flames turn colors when Uncle Doc would toss In balled-up wrapping paper on Christmas.

I longed for a fireplace like theirs.

My wish came true on a Christmas Eve when I was about seven. It was nearly dark when Dad burst through the front door with a huge box in his arms.

“You won’t believe what I got kids!” he exclaimed. 

He ripped open the box and pulled out a fireplace. A life-size cardboard fireplace. We had no idea such magical things existed.

My father nimbly assembled our instant fireplace and we were thrilled to see that it even came with a fire.

Sort of.

In reality, it had cardboard logs and bright orange tissue paper flames that were illuminated from behind by a tiny electric light.

From a distance, it looked real. To a seven-year-old, anyway.

This is a vintage cardboard fireplace from the 1950s or 1960s. A lot like ours, except for the tissue paper flames. Ours was better.

Dad propped the cardboard fireplace against the living room wall and voila! Our humble home seemed, well, magnificent.

Santa friendly, too.

We switched on the light and settled back to enjoy our first fire.

After about 20 minutes of basking in the glow, I noticed something.

“Look,” I exclaimed, “Real smoke!”

Turned out, the little bulb that came with the fireplace hadn’t worked, so my father had substituted a bigger one. A hotter one.

The bulb overheated and ignited the orange tissue paper in a bizarre moment of life imitating art. If a cardboard fireplace counts as art.

My brother and I were so happy. A crackling fire! This was better than expected.

My mother, who clearly thought a cardboard fireplace was ridiculous, grabbed a dish towel and beat the flames until they died, muttering something about “the stupidest thing” she’d ever seen under her breath.

“OK, kids, we won’t turn the firelight on again,” Dad said. “Still, isn’t she a beaut?”

We all - except my mother - agreed that she was.

With the perennial Santa arrival problem solved and with a place to thumbtack our stockings, we were doubly excited for Christmas morning. As I drifted off to sleep I couldn’t wait to sit Indian-style in front of our fake fireplace to open my presents the next morning.

I just knew it would be perfect.

But what we found at daybreak can best be described as Christmas carnage.

Our Irish setter had apparently mistaken the fireplace for some sort of intruder. While we slept, he attacked. By morning he’d gnawed off the mantle and chewed up our stockings.

The living room was covered with cardboard confetti. Our soggy stockings were unsalvageable. The dog was in the doghouse. 

Before we could open a single gift my mother had to vacuum the room - again muttering about what a harebrained idea my father’d had - and we were crying.

Still, for one glorious Christmas Eve we - the Doughertys - who lived in a development where you never smelled wood smoke on a cold night and never warmed yourself by a fire after ice skating on the nearby lake, had a fireplace. In our living room.

And it had been a beaut.