Lexington, KY - A few years ago I was at the Chautauqua Institution in western New York and the evening program, despite it being August, was Advent music. When the usher handed me the program, I was charmed by the cover drawing of St. Mary.
I spoke with the artist, Lee Silk Kaercher, a couple of times after returning from Chautauqua. A copy of her drawing hangs above my worktable and my eyes often go to it. I called Lee again recently, and she gave me permission to pass on this story.
Lee's dad had always wanted a fireplace. He had grown up carrying coal to feed a stove in the family living room. No fireplace. When he married and bought a house, heat came from what Lee called an "octopus-armed oil burner" that filled half the basement. Her dad didn't need a fireplace for heat, but "I think he wanted one for friendliness, and maybe a place for Christmas stockings."
Lee and her younger brother Jim always wanted what Dad wanted, and then a solution, of sorts, presented itself. Lee wonders where the idea came from, and how did it get from idea to production to Murphy's Five and Dime store? If the store's name sounds cozy and welcoming, the people who ran it weren't. "They were sure we kids were hoodlums," Lee said.
The proprietors followed them up and down the wood-floored aisles and would meet them around every corner "like a couple of old cormorants, with their shoulders hunched up and their hands behind their backs, watching us over the tops of their glasses."
Still, Murphy's had fake brick crepe paper. Lee's dad made a sturdy frame of cardboard and scrap wood. Her mother applied the paper and the fireplace was positioned right where a real one should have been. Within the fireplace, tucked among the logs, was a red light bulb topped by a tinfoil propeller. "Dad expected it to turn when the bulb heated up, making quite a convincing conflagration. It actually did turn a bit, though perhaps more from the draft along the hundred-year-old floor." They had their fireplace and they hung their stockings.
Lee was 8 years old, at 12 she began to be embarrassed by the fake fireplace. More sophisticated by then, she had long since denied the reality of Santa Claus, but it was "well before I knew enough to be embarrassed by the Virgin Birth."
"And that's a funny thing," she said. "We had elevated moral discussions regarding real Christmas trees, which we always had, versus artificial trees, which were righteously unacceptable. It was disappointing to even know someone who owned one. Yet we never had the discussions about the Virgin Birth. So with a real tree and a fake fireplace we celebrated an event that most of the world still thinks is not real."
There were a lot of questions Lee wishes the family had talked about when she was a kid. She wishes they could have had even-tempered discussions about doubt and faith. "I wish I could have known then that my mother's faith and my father's faith both included the Virgin Birth, but would have been no less strong if that event was not real. Maybe it would have still taken me as many years to come to a similar place."
Lee finds it strange that she has had five brick and mortar fireplaces since childhood, all of which could hold a fire, but not one with a mantle to hold gift-filled stockings. "The crepe paper creation of my parents' ingenuity safely held its own kind of warmth, holds it still in memory. So I wonder now, how much more real is a real fireplace in a home that doesn't need one for heat? And I wonder if, no matter how implausible they may seem, only those things which hold love are, in truth, real."