The Christmas Putzes

       The child-spirit of old Salem is strangely contagious. For the Visitor, along with the mysterious quickening to life of his buried childhood, holy things become homely, and homely things become holy. The Christmas road of Salem, for all its sacredness, is bordered by glistening Christmas trees, and haunted by gentle old-world fancies from a Germany of long ago. Everyone, no matter how aged, has a Christmas tree and every Christmas tree has its "putz," the word used to describe the decoration, most elaborate and painstaking, of the table or platform on which the tree stands. Some of the Christmas trees that I saw, remain in my memory vivid with the individuality of their treatment. The putz is built and arranged to show a world in miniature, a world most real but small enough for elves to inhabit. No mechanism is too tiny or too intricate for skilled fingers to perfect. I saw one house a foot high, a most luxuriously furnished mansion, on which one father had toiled happily for eighteen months. The foundation of the putz is usually gray-green southern moss, in which are laid out valleys and mountains, grottoes and caves. A favorite device is a mill, seven or eight inches high, which really grinds real meal. One putz that I saw transported me straight back to the Germany of old fairy tales. It had a parapeted castle of sand paper, and in the castle grounds a ten-inch fountain tossed its recurrent jet of water, and from it a stream meandered in a curving green trough cunningly hidden. On it ducks paddled and boats floated. Men fished from a bridge. This putz was arranged with a clever eye to perspective, and was full of details surprising and fascinating, diminutive chalets clinging to gorges, tiny antlered deer taking refuge in a thicket from the huntsman and dogs, a wee, secret spring hung with ferns, cottages busy with every activity, wood-chopping, washing, cooking. There were cows in the fields, sheep upon the hills. The sheep had been made by one of the oldest of the "single sisters," one tied to her chair with rheumatism, but delighting each year to make sheep for the putzes, molding them first out of clay, then covering them with wool, and last painting them so that every feature, nose, mouth, eye, ear, is lifelike, sheep four inches long, wearing bells hung around their necks on bright Christmas ribbon.

A Christmas Putz is a small village scene beneath holiday trees.

       No family's putz is ever exactly alike on two successive Christmases, although separate objects in the decorations may appear year after year. I saw one sturdy hand-made house, less than a foot in dimensions, which has served four generations in the same family. One of the most beautiful Christmas trees I saw was beautiful in significance only, for it had no ornaments and no putz. The eighty-year-old grandmother called it her "Goodwill tree," for its sole trimming was Christmas cards fluttering from every green twig, and bearing their goodwill messages from all over the world. Although weighted with years, this grandmother is still quick-eyed, quick-hearted. She has been a famous maker of putzes, but now all her Christmas decorations have been divided among the households of her sons, men all active now in the life of church and city.

       Here, beside the "Goodwill tree," I heard tale after tale of the past life of Salem, heard of the old sister, who, living in the community of the Sisters' House, used to steal down to the big kitchen after the rest were in bed, and gather all the scraps into her capacious apron; then she would open the door and softly call all the stray cats and dogs of the neighborhood to a midnight feast; and I heard of the gentle old man, who, coming to spend his last years in the shelter of the "Gemein Haus" of Salem, preferred that people call him not by his real name, Wolf, but address him always as Mr. Schaf and then, unforgettably, I heard of "little Betsey." Of all the kindly dead who still people the chat of old Salem, "little Betsey" stands out vividest in my memory. She lived to her seventies, and she has been seventy years dead, and yet of the many who as children knew her, not one of them ever speaks of her except as "little Betsey." A tiny woman, they have told me, always petted and shielded by two efficient elder sisters, and, so it would seem, by everybody else as well.

       Little Betsey had been from three years old stone-deaf. She spoke all her life the German baby talk she had used when scarlet fever closed her ears forever. But this is not all, she kept until death the fancies she had at three, she believed always that angels carried a dead body straight from the grave to heaven. "No," people would assure me, "little Betsey was not queer, or lacking; little Betsey was as bright as anybody, it was just that after she was deaf people never told her sad things, so she stayed a child always." Bowed, old people have told me how they remember little Betsey, a tiny old woman, radiantly happy to be useful, coming to help them, when they were wee things, to lift the heavy mugs at the children's Christmas love-feasts of long, long ago.

       There, by the "Goodwill tree" I saw and handled some of little Betsey's toys, which she had cherished to the end. There are two tiny carafes with infinitesimal stoppers, and a wee fluted goblet, all three only an inch and a half high, but beautiful in shape, slender bits of thinnest crystal brushed with gold. With the tiny doll and bed two inches long, little Betsey used to make every Christmas a manger scene. The doll is all of wax, and wears a little straight dress tied with a sash, the short black hair is demurely parted, the little red painted slippers are undimmed. You can hold little Betsey's toys in the palm of one hand, but far better than if they were larger, they have a spell to bring back the child heart that loved them. I can picture the joy with which she fashioned a manger out of this little bed of faded pink silk. Words of a poem I have read somewhere come back to me, spoken by the Madonna to the little baby on her lap,

" I have grown wise with littleness.

The Lord of Life is king of prettiness."

       I wonder if anywhere but in Salem there could have lived a little Betsey. I wonder if anywhere but in this city founded on faith in a Child, people would have so tenderly conspired to protect a stricken woman from the sadness of growing up.

       There is in Salem an old star-maker. He has showed me his stars and explained their manufacture. The rays are made of many long slim cones of white paper, the whole illumined by a concealed electric bulb. The star-maker is eighty-seven and still goes every day to his desk in a business office. In off hours he makes his stars and built his putz. He lives in a little fading brick house, which, hidden by boxwood and ivy, looks like a Christmas card.

       Above the old doorway shines one of his white-rayed stars. Together he and his daughter trimmed their Christmas tree and made their putz. The putz represented a tiny forest hamlet in the old legendary fatherland. Little lighted houses looked out from shadowy green. Every wee shingle on the steep roofs had been carefully whittled. A little church out of some fairy tale showed ruddy windows and pushed its steeple up into the overhanging spruce twigs. Elfin footpaths climbed tiny hills. The star-maker had recaptured old, old child-dreams to make his putz. While I gazed at it, caught back myself to a childhood road all magic with lights and haunted shadows, I happened suddenly to look up, out of the window. There in strange juxtaposition to the enchanted elf-world of the Christmas putz, an airplane went soaring beyond the high, bare branches.

       But it was not an old man who built the most magical of all the Christmas putzes, that one which of all my memories of the Christmas city, will always be the most poignant and the most significant, a memory deeper, sharper than the solemn beauty of the Christmas-Eve love-feasts or the profound reverence of the memorabilia service of the New Year. Dreamily I shall always recall the magical pathway of Christmas week, every morning I woke to a world misted by silvery fog and brushed by gleaming frost; soft blue haze wrapped the farther trees, haze soon burned away by the mild December sun; just outside my window on Christmas morning, a cardinal, flashing bright from a silver-misted tree, shrilled out a carol. But these things were of the daylight and may fade, while another picture grows only sharper.

       It is a commonplace to say that the faith that built cathedrals is gone, that the ecstasy of confidence in which mediaeval architects conceived the Gothic arch, and masons carved angel faces on stones is perished from the earth, but in Salem I saw the Christmas road to Bethlehem constructed, immortally fresh and real, out of mere paper and pasteboard and boxes. It is not necessary in order to conceive a dream and give it concrete expression, that a man be himself a dreamer or a poet. The man who made for his two children the most beautiful Christmas putz in Salem, is a practical and prosperous young business man. With wholly instinctive skill in perspective, in color and lighting, above all in subjection of every detail to one central idea, he had built on a low platform a picture which held everyone absolutely silent. People might enter the room full of Christmas bustle and chatter, but in a few moments there would be utter stillness, "I made it," the artist told me, "from an old Bible picture, and from my thoughts."

       Every evening during my two weeks in Salem I crossed the street to visit that softly lighted scene of Bethlehem. To the right the Christmas tree towered to the ceiling, but it was merely symbolic of Christmas cheer and fancy, standing all in shadow except as the rays of the star glistened on spruce twig and tinsel. In the dusk below the tree, sheep glimmered, and in the shadow at the back, far away in the distance, there rose the cone of a snowy mountain. To the left of the tree a huddled Oriental village went climbing. The dim walls had tiny slits of windows, ruddy in the near perspective, fading to white and then to darkness beyond. Slowly and mysteriously as one looked, shapes of men and of animals came to life out of the gloom. All the wall of the room was covered with dark blue paper on which gleamed silver stars forming the constellations. The light came from two spots only, the upper one the diffused radiance, pure white, from a single star hung from the ceiling, and the lower, the ruddy outpouring from a stable cave below the farthest walls of the shadowy, climbing town.

       All the rosy glow from the cave was concentrated within on a tiny naked baby wearing a shining diadem. The figures of the Nativity scene had been bought from a Syrian art dealer and were extraordinarily lifelike. Over the baby's form Mary bent, blue-robed, and Joseph stood near by. Ass and ox gazed wonderingly at the bright manger. In the doorway of the cave knelt the first of the three wise men, a turbanned, robed figure, holding out his gift of gold. Below on the slope of the hill, all in the streaming light from the cave there came an Oriental shepherd, one of his sheep tied by its feet around his neck. Other sheep and other shepherds were discernible on the far hill beyond the town. Slowly as one looked there came looming out of the dusk to the right of the cave, nearer the tree, the shapes of three camels, much larger in scale than any of the other animals, because realistically nearer in perspective. Beside their camels stepped the richly robed figures of the other two wise men.

       The effect of the lighting was magical. Beneath the star the shadows on the flat roofs were ink-black, mysterious with a sense of the crowded Oriental life beneath. It seemed incredible that all Bethlehem could lie so heavily asleep with this miracle of sky and cave to be seen for the mere opening of holden eyes. Yet while all Royal David's city lay unmindful, having turned away a king, a wise man from afar was kneeling at the shining stable door, motionless in an ecstasy of worship. In all that scene the only people who were aware were shepherds, untaught men schooled to faith by watching the nightly pageantry of the sky, and scholars, men made humble by long study of the luminous mystery of the constellations. In the quiet hour before the year's end, I sat gazing at this newly made scene of Bethlehem. In delicate etching of utter grace the branches of the Christmas tree were thrown in shadow upon the deep blue wall. The light from the tiny cave shone forth in steadfast glory. Curiously summoned both the shepherds and the seers had set out on a road heavy with dangers, bordered on either side by black mystery, and at the end they had found, so said the faith that had constructed this Christmas putz in old Salem ‚at the end of their road they had found a shining Child and an unquenchable Star. W. Kirkland

A Christmas village (or putz) is a decorative, miniature-scale village often set up during the Christmas season. These villages are rooted in the elaborate Christmas traditions of the Moravian church, a Protestant denomination. Mass-produced cardboard Christmas villages became popular in the United States during the early and mid-20th century, while porcelain versions became popular in the later part of the century. Read more...