by Ardeana Hamlin
of The Weekly Staff
As the Christmas season arrived when I was a teenager in the early 1960s, it was taken for granted that sooner or later my sister, my friends and I would go caroling.
Sometimes, this was arranged as part of our Congregational Church Pilgrim Fellowship group, but often it was spontaneous. Someone at school would say, “Let’s go caroling tonight.” A time and place to meet was agreed upon and off we’d go. It was that simple.
We lived in Bingham, a town of 1,200 souls. We knew which families had in their care elderly parents or relatives. We knew who had small children, or a new baby. We knew which big, old houses were inhabited by elderly single ladies. We knew who needed to be sung to. No one needed to tell us. It was common knowledge.
After supper, with the wood stove humming and the remnants of the good supper cooked by my mother still on the table, my sister and I bundled up. In those days, bundling up meant wool jackets or coats, wool pants, knee-length socks, handknit mittens and faux-fur lined boots that came up around the ankle, like a collar. One year, my sister and I wore new red and white striped scarves six feet long wound around and around our necks. I tied bells in the fringe of mine so the faint sound of jingling followed me as I walked.
The temperature in December of the 1960s, when the idea of climate change or global warming was unknown to us, often was in the low 20s, or the teens. Snow had been on the ground since before Thanksgiving, usually a lot. But we were used to the cold. Nearly everyone walked to school in the morning, home for lunch, back to school and home again when school was done for the day. We walked everywhere. It was not assumed that a parent would drive us anywhere.
Nearly everyone at school was a member of the chorus or the glee club, or both. Everyone sang — our music teacher Marion Knight had seen to that. We had sung in school daily from the time we were in kindergarten. We knew all the carols by heart and we knew how to sing the harmonies.
But we never knew how many would show up to go caroling — one year it might be as few as six, other years, a dozen or more. No one insisted that we do it because it would look good in college applications. We went caroling because we enjoyed it.
Bundled up enough to pass my mother’s inspection, my sister and I set forth along Main Street, the glow of the streetlights haloing the velvety dark along the sidewalk and the road. We began to sing long before we arrived at the designated meeting place. “Sleigh bells ring, are you listening; In the lane snow is glistening; What a beautiful sight, we’re happy tonight; Walking in a winter wonderland.” That was one of our favorite songs, though it was not, strictly speaking, a carol.
And we were happy — happy because the cold and the night enfolded us, drawing us into its chilly, eternal mystery; happy because we were going off to sing with our friends; happy with ourselves because we were young, free and had no cares.
Soon, we were with our friends and classmates — Mike, Donnie, Steve, John, Bruce, Gene, Ronnie, Billy, Caryl, Suzanne, Barbara, Joan, Bonnie, Tammy, Charlotte, others — the boys often hatless, risking the prospect of frostbitten ears, some of the girls sporting earmuffs or knitted angora bands that covered ears and tied under the chin.
Someone started singing a carol and the rest of us joined in. We sang as we walked, filling our town with the sound of the Christmas season.
Like a wool encased school of fish with no apparent leader, we ended up standing in front of the houses occupied by people we wanted to sing to.
Like the Wise Men of old, we wandered near and far all over town — the stars diamond points of light above us embedded in the endless black of the night sky, the Milky Way spilling across the heavens, the Big Dipper rising.
At each house, the vague form of a man or a woman, almost like a ghost, would appear in the dim light at a window and wave to us as we sang. That was our reward, not that we expected or wanted any. We were caroling because it was fun, because it was almost Christmas, because we knew that the best gift we could give our town was the sound of our voices singing, “Caroling, caroling off we go, Christmas bells are ringing.”
When the cold finally penetrated our woolen clothing, the group of singers gradually decreased in number, as each person turned onto his or her street, until it was just my sister and I again. We kept singing until we reached our front door, “Silent night, holy night, All is calm, all is bright …”
It was our version of peace on earth, good will toward men.