Looking back: How Christmas celebrations have changed

Observance of the Christmas holiday in West Milford has changed greatly over the years from the time when celebrating the birthday of the Christ child was believed to be what the season was all about.

The early settlers from Europe brought their customs with them when they arrived in America to begin new lives. Mostly Christians, they settled and built a church, school and general store in their self-sufficient little communities.

Presbyterians settled in Oak Ridge and at West Milford Village. The Methodists founded Newfoundland as their hometown. The Baptists were in Macopin and on the mountain at Moe Mountain. The Long Pond Ironworks settlement also had a Protestant church.

The earliest Roman Catholic church settlement was at Echo Lake, with a second one later in the Hewitt/Greenwood Lake area.

In each of those communities, much of the community activity was in the schools and churches. Later when firehouses were built, activities were also held there.

Each little town had small one- or two-room schoolhouses, except for the Newfoundland School, which had three rooms.

Generally, most activities were held in church halls or churches because of the large rooms. For instance, all the graduations from the public schools were held in churches until after 1946, when the Hillcrest School was built and became the first Township of West Milford consolidated school.

Christmas was a very special time in the small rural schools. There are still a few people in town who remember those days and have stories to tell.

Shirley Tice Rhinesmith Mazalewski and Carol Little Perry can tell about their memories of Newfoundland; John Fredericks and Bob Nicholson grew up in Oak Ridge; and Mary Corter Jobes, Catherine Treiber Smith and yours truly well remember the tales from Echo Lake.

Church choirs existed in all the churches. At Oak Ridge Presbyterian, Fredericks played the organ for years and when he married Jane Dixon of Butler, she became church choir director.

Mrs. Michelfelder was church musician at West Milford Presbyterian Church for decades and eventually her pupil Phyliss Copley Van Hooker became the church organist and choir director.

At St. Joseph Church in the Echo Lake community, my mother, Verina Mathews Genader, was taught to play the piano as a young child by Martha Sehulster.

Originally, the church had an organ with pedals to pump for operating energy. Lenore Decker was an early organist at the church.

My mother remembered when the church pipe organ was installed in the choir loft when she was about 10 years old. Its gold pipes were part of the church architectural beauty, but the organ has been removed recently and there only are memories of it today. She became the volunteer organist and remained so throughout most of her lifetime.

There was always a choir, and each year at Christmas, they performed “Mass in F” by William Leonard with Catherine “Kate” Rogers Hennion as the soloist.

One year, former Councilman Peter Gillen and his buddies decided to add live animals to the life-sized crèche display that was in outside the church each Christmas. They trucked in some animals, among them a donkey, remembering photos of the holy family having one.

Father Cornelius Kelly was pastor at the time, and this seemed like a great idea to him too. The live animals were all in place when the organ music and singing began. The music must have inspired the donkey because he started braying along with the singers.

One can only imagine what the parishioners in the pews thought as they turned around and looked up at the choir. Needless to say live animals were not in the display the next year.

Before Our Lady Queen of Peace Church was built in Hewitt, there was a small mission church on Lincoln Avenue named St. Catherine’s. The building still stands and is now a thrift shop.

There was going to be a Christmas Mass there with the Rev. Paschal Kerwin as priest. He was a commander in the U.S. Navy Reserve and had traveled from Toulon, France, to Yokohama, Japan, with the U.S. amphibious forces.

He was a Franciscan and lived in the friary at Butler with other priests who staffed the Catholic mission churches in the area, including St. Joseph. They did not have anyone who could play the small organ in the church for the Christmas service. Somehow someone knew I had started playing for services at St. Joseph and I was asked to play the organ.

Township Engineer G. Waldo Rude, a member of the West Milford Presbyterian Church who was known for his beautiful singing voice, was asked to sing, and together we did the church service Christmas music.

Later when Our Lady Queen of Peace Church replaced St. Catherine’s Church, I became the organist there and played the organ and piano during services for many years. Incidentally, until Father Brice Levens came in as pastor, church musicians were unpaid and volunteered their music. Father Brice insisted that musicians were professionals and should be treated as such.

We had a 28-voice choir at Our Lady Queen of Peace that included a good number of men. Mary Kelly and Ginny Hedgecock were soloists. The Rev. Roland Fregault was the pastor and he liked to direct choirs. I remember accompanying the choir on the organ with Father Roland directing during a Christmas Eve service. His brother Armand was also a priest and came to town to conduct the Mass.

At least one Christmas Eve, it was hard to keep the choir’s attention when baseball great Derek Jeter came into the church with his family. They were in town to spend the holiday with his grandmother, who has been a longtime parishioner. It was quite a night with the choir focused on Jeter and his family seated downstairs in a pew.

In the rural schoolhouses, we had a Bible reading every morning, displayed crèches, sang Christmas carols and presented programs for parents with the celebration of Christmas being observed as the birth of the Christ child.

Santa made appearances at school and church with a small gift - sometimes a box of Christmas candy. The Christmas story was presented in the dramatic presentations by the children along with skits, poems and stories about Santa.

Homemade gifts were made in classrooms. They included a white birch log hollowed out with space for candles, decorated with greens we gathered in the woods. The eighth-grade boys often went into the woods with a teacher to cut a tree to be brought to the classroom and adorned with homemade decorations by the students.

It was a different time - but one with rich memories!