New Age

When I was in fourth grade, my music teacher, Mrs. Piper, taught our class “Over the River and Through the Woods,” a song about traveling to grandmother’s house in a horse-drawn sleigh. It was written by Lydia Maria Child in 1844 as a Thanksgiving song, but Mrs. Piper changed the line from “Hurrah for Thanksgiving Day” to “Hurrah for Christmas Day” and we sang it at our school’s Christmas program. There is an abundance of Christmas songs, and scarcely any Thanksgiving songs. Why Mrs. Piper stole from the poor to give to the rich puzzled me, but I was a conformist and goose-stepped right along.

As a child, I didn’t understand Mrs. Piper’s attraction to the song. She was up in years, but not old enough to have relied on horses for transportation. The only horse-drawn sleigh in our town belonged to Mike Glover, who never carried anyone to grandmother’s house—his or theirs—but did give rides in the park when snow was on the ground. The trips my family made to my grandmother’s house, 120 miles away, were in a 1970 Ford Country Squire station wagon with plastic woodgrain siding. The only similarity between the song and real life was the pumpkin pie. In the song, Grandma baked her own pumpkin pies. My grandmother purchased hers at Harold’s Market in Vincennes. Pumpkin pie might be the only food that’s just as good store-bought as it is homemade.

Mrs. Piper was my music teacher for three years, and by the end of our association I despised “Over the River and Through the Woods.” Mostly because I was desperate to be hip, which is hard to pull off when singing, “the horse knows the way to carry the sleigh through the white and drifted sno-ho.” In the song, one gets the impression Lydia Maria Child’s grandmother lived in a charming cottage nestled in the woods. She actually resided at 114 South Street in Medford, Massachusetts, which, when Miss Child wrote the song, was practically a mansion, with four Ionic columns, a half-dozen bedrooms, and servants’ quarters. It turns out servants baked the pumpkin pie, not Grandma. Interestingly, the house still stands and is now owned by Tufts University.

Because of that song and the nostalgia it engendered, I spent every Christmas of my youth in the back end of our station wagon, riding to Grandma’s, two hours each way, where I was presented with the same gift each year—a pair of white tube socks, for which I was to appear profoundly grateful.

“What do you say to Grandma?” my mother would prompt.

“Thank you for the white socks,” I would say. “They’re my favorite color.”

I now realize Mrs. Piper and my parents were trying to instill a sense of tradition in me, which I didn’t appreciate at the time. Now I’m older, have children of my own, and know the value of such things. Unfortunately, when my grandmother passed away in 1989, my parent’s yen for nostalgia likewise expired. Tradition was cast aside like old skivvies. My parents ditched their live Christmas tree, bought a fake one from Target, and mused aloud about spending the holidays in Florida.

Which brings me to my topic—the wholesale abandonment of traditional values by today’s elders. In short, the old folks are letting us down.

I was speaking with a friend who had recently returned to her hometown to visit her 75 year-old mother. When it came time for supper, her mother fed her frozen lasagna from Kroger.

“Can you believe that?” my friend said. “Frozen lasagna! My grandmother would be spinning in her grave if she knew her daughter fed her family frozen food. Then, get this, I see my mother maybe four times a year, so I wanted to sit and visit, but she wanted to go shopping. She’s always shopping.”

“It’s this older generation,” I told her. “They think money grows on trees. If they’re not shopping, they’re at the casinos. I don’t know what they’re thinking, but I’ve just about had it.”

Ah, Mrs. Piper. I miss that woman more each year. And given today’s crop of elders, I see nothing but clouds on the horizon.

I am acquainted with a school music teacher in her 60s. I phoned to ask if they still taught the children “Over the River and Through the Woods.” Just as I suspected, it’s been deep-sixed.

“We canned that old chestnut years ago,” she said.

It gets worse.