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by Joe Essid Jr.
Mom was hard on ornaments. Period. I saw her break a bunch of them. There's a long, sad, story about her dad Edward Bolton Sr., an alcoholic, wrecking her mother's Christmases many years. But I won't darken the holidays with some memories passed on to me. Certain stories should just fade and vanish.
Suffice to say mom was still determined to have a Christmas for her kids, despite that backstory. Add to that living in a family where the Lebanese side often would not decorate or have a tree, because (as was usually the case) some 2nd or 3rd cousin or great-aunt from the Old Country had passed that year. This, to a kid, was bizarre beyond comprehension.
Why couldn't we put up a tree, since the person who died was some strange-looking old person, often with a giant Lebanese nose, who stared at you fiercely and only spoke Arabic with your grandparents? Me? I wanted a new GI Joe Action Sailor and a giant tree! Luckily for me, Big Joe understood. He'd get a tree for us, usually on Christmas Eve when the prices came down. We were, objectively, poor people then. We had one old car subjected to many fender-benders by my carefree brother, Louis, and we had a work truck dad used to haul produce. If there were not enough loads to haul, we got by.
Today, as a result, I do not put up the tree too early; I loved the ritual of going out after dark in the chilly air to pick something out. Then we came home to trim the tree.
Mom inherited lots of Granny Bolton's ornaments. When I came along, Lillie Maude Bolton (in the photo at the left) was a little old, very proper, lady from Lakeside. Mom's "Legal Record of Live Birth" from January 4, 1921 gives Granny's name as Lillie Maude Branch (an old Richmond name, that.) which was her Maiden name before marrying William E. Bolton. I recall her well but barely knew her. I do know she did not approve of her feral, spoiled grandson's behavior.
Mom told stories of her childhood in Highland Park, a grand old neighborhood of Richmond that went to seed. The birth record shows the address as 15 Magnolia Avenue.
I never saw the place, until I looked for it while writing this. I think it's gone. No Magnolia Avenue exists in Richmond. A Magnolia Street does, and #15 shows a divided road with light-industrial buildings. Any grand old dilapidated house was bulldozed years ago, along with the green grass where their milk-cow, Dotsie, grazed. I'd love to have a photo but at least I have a second-hand memory. Parts of Magnolia Street were not destroyed to make ugliness, and that end of the street reveals some old stucco and frame homes that might be more than a century old. So we have that at least, a shadow of a shadow. Like the Essid's house on Rosewood, it shares our city's stupid decisions to destory working-class housing for the false gods of highways and crappy light-industrial commerce. One wonders how this early loss shaped mom. Others were to follow.
The Bolton house I knew, on Nelson Street in Lakeside, was prim and well decorated. Everything was just so, unlike the chaos of our house, largely caused by me. For the record, Granny was daughter of Lelia Anna Patterson, born Oct. 13, 1865, in the hard months following the end of the Civil War. Lelia married John Bell Branch, born Nov. 7, 1860. I don't have their dates of death, but I do have the name of Granny Bolton's sister, Mary Gwendolyn Branch, born March 27, 1891. Granny was born Dec. 4, 1887 and passed on Oct. 30, 1967.
Yes, I know that the photo above is dated 1968. For those of you too young to recall film cameras, my best guess is that someone had a roll of film lying about, got it developed, and found a photo of Granny Bolton that I now own.
In 1967, I think we still had a tree, at mom's insistence. At least that his how I will remember it. Get your time machine out to check the facts, if you wish. Meanwhile, if you want to see Granny's and the other Bolton family graves, they can be found in Oakwood Cemetery. The family name is English.
In 2009, I was on an academic trip to Yorkshire; Nan and I stumbled across oodles of Boltons. There's still a well-to-do branch of the Bolton family that owns Bolton Castle, a local landmark we toured with some of the finest gardens in that part of England. I wish they'd had ornaments in the gift shop! I tipped in photos of us at the castle, and a shot of the gardens, below.
Yorkshire vista from the gardens of Bolton Castle
One by one, mom broke the ornaments left to her by Lillie Maud Bolton; the collection of mom's sister Mickey probably survived, but I have no idea where they went. Mickey was as Type-A and neat as Lillie Maud (or me. I pack my ornaments away with care). I don't think mom's carnage was malice, at least early on. She would, however, get mad and break one just to show me who was boss, when I complained about the rough treatment of our ornaments. Mom just put things away HARD. Her ornaments were not lovingly wrapped in paper. They got tossed into boxes. Bim! Bam! Crash!
The three I'm still looking to replace were a glass ball with a painted Christmas scene, little glass bell and, the penultimate one that I recall mom busting a few years before she passed in 2005, a glass log cabin. I'll know the ornaments' clones when I see them! Take that, Mom!
But thank God for Bakelite, an early plastic.
Great-granny Lelia is a cypher to me. I don't even have her date of death. But I have a Christmas ornament that belonged to her, a small red globe orbited by blue and gold spheres, and now I'm giving it to John and Claudia Ryan, who often host the family Christmas party. May it grace the Ryan home for decades to come. I've displayed it in our dining room in Goochland since last Christmas.
When I'm a pile of happy dust, after living a full and cranky life against the grain, may your descendants upload this little story into the chips implanted in their brains, or tell it around campfires (my preferred future). Just put those ornaments away with care, or my spirit will come, clanking chains like Marley to taunt Scrooge, one Christmas Eve to stare down his big Lebanese nose at the children.
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