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I grew up out in the sticks, as they say. Beaufort, MO is really more an intersection of highways than an actual “town” and my house was a fifteen minute drive away from that. We lived down a gravel road with few neighbors, on eight acres of land that was mostly woods, about an hour west of St. Louis. Each Christmas Eve Day, early in the morning, we would drive out of the country, and through St. Louis city to get to my grandma’s house in Illinois. I remember each time we would make that drive, I couldn’t wait to get to the area of I-44 right around Kingshighway to Grand, I’d look up from whatever book I was reading and out the windows of the car at all of the brick houses standing side by side, facing the interstate. To my eyes, they weren’t crumbling eyesores. I don’t think I even saw the boarded up windows and graffiti.
To me, those houses were what it meant to live in the city. I imagined that because the houses themselves were so close, that the people inside of them would be equally close to the folks in the home next to them. Maybe they’d open windows and pass things to each other, like a pie or a borrowed cup of sugar, or do that whole bit with the tin cans and the string to make telephones. I thought the houses made of red brick hugged one another so beautifully and I would think about how one day I’d like to live in a house like that. My parents thought I was crazy to want to live all bunched together with my neighbors when I had so much space to roam around in the woods. However, they would then almost always start reminiscing a bit about growing up in Soulard, the trolley cars, downtown window displays at the holidays and stickball games in the street. They lived in St. Louis during another era and their experiences romanticized this city for me. By the time I was a child, the city wasn’t somewhere they wanted to drive into, it was only something to drive straight through. The house my mom grew up in was gone and replaced by an Anheuser Busch parking lot. The neighborhoods they knew as kids and young adults were now ghostly, rundown and seemingly dangerous. I think if they could see all of the wonderful things that are happening in St. Louis today, what Soulard has re-made of itself, all of the other neighborhoods that are slowly coming back to life, the fight to bring back the trolleys and save the old buildings and the great potential the future holds, that it would make them very happy indeed.
For somewhere around 15 years, every Christmas Eve also meant a drive back home, west from Illinois, back through the dark with a view of all the thousands of lights of downtown St. Louis as we crossed the bridge. The specks of silver and gold dancing on the Mississippi River as we crossed it; The Arch shimmering like a loop on a giant silver Christmas bow, reflecting it all. We made that same drive at other times of the year but my mind seems to only really remember it at Christmas time. After we would pass through the city into the dull landscape of suburbia, I would lie down in the seat and watch the hazy yellow glow of the highway street lamps grow further and further apart until we hit the open countryside and the twinkles of the stars grew stronger with the increasing darkness. I did not know which I loved more, the dark starry night of the country or the many thousand points of light that made the city sparkle.
All of this to explain one of the reasons why “Silver Bells” is my favorite Christmas song. I especially love this version by Loretta Lynn; appropriately enough, a country girl singing about Christmas in the big city.
Merry Christmas to you and yours.
XO Janet
Filed under: AM, St. Louis Local
