CHRISTMAS COLORS

Every Monday after Thanksgiving I would start my annual project that continued throughout my elementary school days after I did the first one in third grade for Miss Russell – and this year I was determined to out-do last year’s chalkboard Christmas mural (and yes we were allowed to call the season Christmas in those days)  This temporary picture, my last year before high school, was going to be my final masterpiece.  I decided on the subject that I wanted to do and got the shoe-box of colored chalk that had been collected over the years.  I had been given time off from regular school work  in every class for six years at each major holiday to express myself on the blackboards that wrapped around our classroom and in those days; they were black, not green or white or electronic.  A daily dose of chalk dust permeated our kid's lives for nine and a half months each year.

To get a new idea for this year, I had surveyed all the Winter issues of the Ideals Magazine in our school library - this was the teacher's Bible for  bulletin boards.  The scene I choose to duplicate was in the December 1957 issue - a classic Raphel type scene rather than a comic book cartoon.

 (Editor's note: In the 50's religious subjects were permitted to be discussed and celebrated in the public school.  At the start of every day that I went to elementary school a student had read a chapter of the old testament and we then recited the pledge of allegiance to the flag which was in the front of every classroom (although most of us didn't know what an allegiance was - but that’s a subject for other blogs, podcasts and rants on Twitter.)

    Back to my story.  This year I would produce a Nativity that used not one - but all of the blackboards in the classroom - it was to be a lifesize tableau and I would finally become to Bacon School's blackboards what Michelangelo was to the ceilings.

And so I began...the Wise Men came first, riding camels from the left.  This year I added something totally avant garde to my creation.  Along with the shepherds coming across the room from the right, wanting to touch all bases in our kid's world, I added Rudolph the Reindeer and Frosty the Snowman in a stand of pines decorated with actual red and green paper chains.  I used the giant jar of paste that every class had and every kid I had tried a taste to stick silver stars on the black sky.  These were the kind we got for a 100 on a spelling test.  Lastly, I added a large Star of David hovering over the stable.  However, I must admit that I stretched my labor out as far as I could to keep me out of doing arithmetic.  One day while I was working on final touches and shading another teacher came into our classroom and interrupted a lesson in diagramming a split infinitive or something like that?  After a brief hushed conversation with my beloved teacher I was told that I had been drafted to create another mural for this teacher's classroom.

Those weeks before our long awaited Christmas vacation I did four other blackboards of various subjects for various teachers.  I had become for Bacon School's holiday blackboards what Michelangelo was to ceilings.