I knew that whatever Christmas presents we got they were from our parents, but Father Christmas definitely played his role when my mom and dad could save money for presents.
I emptied my “Merry Christmas, Florin!” glass and took a kitchen knife and went outside. The Christmas tree was standing in the snow in the same spot Finul Moisică had left it the day before. I took it and hit it against the clean ground twice. The snow at its bottom fell off. Then I started to cut the bottom off so that it would fit in our homemade Christmas tree stand.
The stand had a 15cm pipe right in the middle of it and it was into that pipe I had to fit and fix the Christmas Tree. My father said that when a friend of his made us that stand we had no bigger pipe, and that was the reason I or my father had to work for half an hour or so every year outside chopping at the Christmas tree so it would fit in that pipe.
We heard many stories of Christmas trees that fell down and entire households were lost in the resulting fires. Yes, that’s right. Back then all ornaments were made from very thin painted glass and we could place real candles on the Christmas tree, taking care not to place them below upper branches, and we used to light those candles and tell Christmas stories in their dim but beautiful light.
How beautiful it was. But still, I had to chop and chop until my Christmas tree was just a little bit thicker than its stand. And I was sweating hard to get it done that year.
As usual the tree was taller than it needed to be. Our ceiling was 3m high, but that Christmas tree was also 3m high so I had to cut about 3cm off it to allow for the top decoration and stand.
Furious hacking took the bottom off in minutes. But that was only the beginning. The knife was sharp enough to cut the young tree, but I had to hold the tree upright all the time, so as not to damage its branches. The whole process became more and more difficult.
Think I had protective gloves? Think again. Communist Romania wasn’t a consumer society and we had no such gloves. Even people working in industry with hot iron sometimes had to work with bare hands, and it’s amazing what people can learn to endure in time. But I didn’t have tough hands and as a fourteen year old my skin was still like a child’s. The cold tree started to hurt my fingers as it sucked the heat out of them, long before I was tired from cutting. But I couldn’t stop. Not then. I couldn’t take a break, I couldn’t cry for help. The bottom of the tree was getting thinner and thinner so I had to continue for the joy of that day.
My dad would be so proud. It used to be his job and while I was standing beside him in the cold, in the years of my childhood, it seemed a very easy job to do. Cut. Turn. Cut. Turn. And cut again. But the job wasn’t easy. Even the task of keeping the tree up was a complicated one. But perseverance was the key so I continued until I had it done.
Stretching my back, 40 minutes after I had started, I set the tree standing in the snow and I went inside for a hot cocoa and the stand I had cleaned.
Cocoa was my favorite drink that time of year. On rainy days too. I always made it myself, not trusting my mom to do it right. Three tablespoons of Dutch cocoa, three tablespoons of sugar and, because it was so cold outside, an egg yolk. Then came the frenetic mixing while the milk was being heated on the hub. The secret of a tasty drink was to pour the milk into the mug little by little and as you mixed it in.
And there I was, with a mug of hot cocoa at the window, looking outside at the snow. That morning my mom must have made the willow fire. Smoke had started to fill the smokehouse. The snow on its roof was already butter yellow and I hoped it would melt in the next couple of days. A butter yellow roof wasn’t a sight that suited Christmas.
My father wasn’t home and I supposed that he was at the town hall, in the middle of our town’s own revolution. With the communist mayor gone and the communist party office completely vandalized there wasn’t so much to do there. Some soldiers from the Military Unit guarding the Marsa Mecanichal had been brought in to help defend the building in case of a terrorist attack, but with Ceauşescu prisoner that was unlikely to happen.
My hands were already hot when I finished the hot cocoa drink. We always had first class cocoa powder from the Netherlands or China, so my mornings were always perfect. That Seagull cocoa powder we got in those big orange cans from Shanghai was especially delicious. But we weren’t always lucky enough to find it every time so we had to buy the lower quality Dutch cocoa.
I couldn’t have known that day that freedom would, in a matter of only a couple of months, bring to our stores tons of instant cocoa drinks made by Nestle which compared in taste with the cocoa that I made that day, like tap water in New Delhi compares to Evian.
Yes, capitalism wasn’t as delicious as we imagined it.
“What’s this? Chicken or fish?” was a question that I never asked before we were “free”. Chickens during communist times would take more than a year to grow big enough to eat. And they tasted like chicken. Fish tasted like fish. Pork tasted like pork not like salted something or other. The food produced in Romanian farms was all organic, the word steroids hadn’t yet entered the Romanian vocabularly and antibiotics were just for very sick people not for the birds, fish and mammals in our food chain.
I took the cleaned and polished Christmas tree stand outside. The front yard was the best spot to fix the tree into it, and not in our parents’ room, where the tree traditionally stood.
I placed the support on a patch of clean icy ground, where it was unlikely to get dirty, and I brought the tree over to it. I only had one go at getting it set in the stand right.
I intentionally left the end of the tree a little bit larger than the pipe in which I was going to set it, so when in, it would stay in. Carefully I placed the tree right over the dark pipe and then I forced it down into it with an almost perfect hit. When I lifted the tree again in the air the stand lifted, too, so I hit it once again, with all my strength. I was done.
Satisfied I took the tree upstairs. When I entered the hallway my mom was there on the phone.
“Why don’t you go to the doctor?” she was asking in a pissed off tone. “Ceauşescu has been caught, you are safe — the police won’t ask questions about how you got wounded”.
I realized that she was on the phone with Vasile. Later I learned that he called her to tell her he needed something stronger than wine. His leg had doubled in size over night and brandy was the best painkiller he could think of.
His wife Teodora was about to arrive to fetch some bottles.
My mom spoke in a very angry tone.
“If you don’t promise me you’ll go to the doctor or ask the doctor to come and see you, I won’t give her any brandy, do you hear me?”
My mom ended up giving him the brandy. He promised to go for medical treatment, but it was February 1991 before we learned that he hadn’t gone. He poured the brandy on the wound and in his stomach, too, and got better before New Year’s Eve. However, in the long run that choice was a very poor one.
Iliescu wanted very good servants when he battled the liberals and christian democrats for power, so his government started to give gifts to the revolutionaries.
There were commissions formed and if people could prove they were involved in the events or got wounded they would receive a fortune.
Vasile couldn’t receive anything. He was shot but got no award. So he missed out on the apartment that others got, the 500 square meters of land inside a town or 10,000 square meters outside towns, tax exemption for life on a piece of real estate of his choice, among other benefits.
Others were not even shot and hit the jackpot. Like the mother-in-law of the 2009 Presidential Candidate, Mr. Geoana. She was, like many in the television station, not a victim but a beneficiary of the communist regime. So after the Revolution she claimed that she had dropped a box on her right leg and got injured. And she hit the jackpot. And 20 years later still claims that that leg hurts, but now she points to the other leg, or at least that’s what we read in the newspapers.