Grandparents can be asked to think back, to hunt out and to recall everything they know about their grandparents, so that their grandchildren can hear what they heard. Once when we were studying children's ideas about time, a little boy said that for him "long ago" was before his grandfather's grandfather's time. His own grandfather, he explained, told him the stories that his grandfather had told him about his boyhood. So real and lively were these tales that the boy today felt that he could reach out with his own hand and touch that distant time four generations ago.
If your family has a small tape recorder, or can borrow one, you can make a record of just how one story led to another....
There will be many different kinds of things to put into the books. Old dance programs with tiny pencils attached by silk cords to write in the names of partners, a blue ribbon won as a prize at a county fair and souvenir post cards brought home from world's fairs, the lace collar that adorned Grandmother's first dancing dress, a bit of tattered shawl carefully laid away by a great-aunt, Father's first report cards, which Grandpa secretly kept, and Grandma's precious recipe for plum pudding, written out in her mother's spidery handwriting, lacy valentines, the front page from the "extra" hawked by newsboys on Armistice Day, 1918, a pressed white rose from a wedding bouquet — all these have their stories to tell.
Some books will need a lot of pages for the already well-remembered past, in case some grandmother or great-grandfather kept the family tree well in mind and made records or kept a diary about events in the lives of relatives. In some few families there may be a straight line of eight, or even nine, generations back to the Revolutionary War....
For other families, life in America began only yesterday. Grandmother came here as a young girl to find work or to visit relatives, and stayed to marry. "She and Grandfather came over on the same boat, but they only met 10 years later." For these families there are the ties European, Middle Eastern, or Far Eastern towns — old letters in foreign languages, photographs of great-aunts and uncles and cousins who stayed in the Old Country.
There will be gaps, of course, and many families today know little that is personal about their particular ancestors. But grandparents will be able to name the little town in the Carpathians or the tiny island off the coast of Scotland from which, it is said, their parents or grandparents came.
And never mind if the legends about them are romanticized, so that ancestors from Wales had a castle in the family and remote Irish ancestors were kings and queens and a slave ancestor was known to all his descendants as a proud rebel who won his own freedom.... Family legends are as much a part of our history as the true events out of which they grew and the real people around whom we have built our romances about the past....If there are family movies — and many families have some stowed away — still photographs can be made from these that show wedding scenes and family reunions and picnics and children, who are now staid, middle-aged adults, turning somersaults on the lawn.
Grumpy uncles and critical aunts will seem more human when Grandma tells stories about their childhood, when they stole corn or watermelons or threw the winter wood down the well or ran away and thumbed a ride home in an empty hearse. Children will be comforted to know their fathers and mothers sometimes made poor grades in school or played hooky or cut their hair with the nail scissors. No one whose mischief and sad experiences and triumphs can be shared by the children can remain just a name or a stranger — of no matter how long ago — because children too have been mischievous and sad and triumphant from time to time.
And history itself will come alive. You can make up a chart of memorable historical dates and in between these set down the dates when grandparents — and you, the parents of your children — were born, met, and married. History won't seem so distant and unreal for the child who can say that Grandma was 10 years old when in 1927 Lindbergh flew the Atlantic, that Grandpa was just 15 that day in March, 1934, when all the banks were closed, and that a great-aunt, just out of college, was sitting in a dentist's chair when she saw what looked like snowflakes — in full summer — drifting pat the window. Of course, they were really the bits of paper people were tearing up and throwing from windows to welcome V-J Day in 1945.
So history will reach from a grandfather to his grandfather, from a grandmother to her grandmother, and from grand-parents to their grandchildren….
From "Interview with Santa Claus" by Margaret Mead and Rhoda Métraux © 1978 by Margaret Mead and Rhoda Métraux. Abridged and reprinted by permission of Walker and Company.
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