Kenneth’s Elf
I don’t usually start my blog by asking you to take a good look at whatever image I have chosen for this week. But today I am asking you to do that. This elf, which most in my family consider to be the most creepy thing they have ever seen, is what I refer to as “Kenneth’s Elf.” Long before the now iconic Elf on a Shelf was making Christmas merry for millions of children, Kenneth’s Elf has been a part of my Christmas for close to 50 years. And subsequently a part of my owns children’s Christmases as well.
This point was brought home to me last night when my now 30 year old son and his wife came over to my house for dinner. He walked into the kitchen and spotted Kenneth’s Elf dangling from the knob of the kitchen cabinet. First words out of his mouth were “Mom, do you really have to hang that thing up every year? It’s the creepiest elf I have ever seen.” I laughed, because honestly this is the same conversation I have had with all of my children and even shocked friends, every Christmas. No one else seems to love Kennth’s Elf as much as I do. So as we sat around the dinner table last night I re told the story of Kenneth’s Elf to my son, who I know has heard it before but has obviously forgotten, yet again. I told the story to his wife, who had never heard of it and as I did so I thought, you know more people need to know about Kenneth’s Elf, good thing I write a blog!!! So this week I’m sharing this story with all of you.
My first memory of actually seeing Kenneth’s Elf in my own home for Christmas was sometime around 1974 or so. You see my grandmother’s next door neighbor, Mildred McEwen, had given these two Christmas elves to my mother, one for me and one for my sister. Mom hung them from the knobs of the built in china cabinet in our kitchen. Like my own children, I thought the elves were the creepiest things I had ever seen and I could not believe my mother hung them up. But if you know my Mom, you know she’s a very respectful person. Mildred was a family friend, she had helped my mother while going through a divorce. She was my grandmother’s friend and neighbor. Mildred was a childless widow with no immediate family that any of us knew about. Despite what we thought of these elves, it was only showing gratitude and respect to hang them up, even if it were only for that year. So up on the china cabinet knobs the two elves went. Their gangling arms and legs, which looked to be made out of some form of those old pipe cleaners, pointing out in all directions. Their hands and feet were just wooden beads pushed onto the end of their arms and legs. Their coats and hats made of paper and their little faces made from some form of very early plastic. There was nothing festive or merry about these Christmas elves!
To me, Mildred was an ancient old lady who lived all alone in a huge rambling victorian house next to my grandparents. The home was full of antiques, heavy damask curtains, dark wood, paintings of angels, lots of cherubs, and a beautiful portrait of a woman and a little boy that sat in the middle of the fireplace mantle in her living room. Mildred’s husband, Harry had passed away in 1968, when I was just a toddler. There’s an old family story surrounding a rocking chair that was positioned in Harry & Mildred’s kitchen. Apparently Harry was very fond of me and used to rock me in that rocking chair as Mildred cooked or worked in the kitchen. A kitchen I might add that had pink appliances and a pink counter top, all from an renovation they had done in the 1940’s. I still remember that kitchen! Shortly after Harry passed away, as the story goes, I was at Mildred’s house for a visit and little toddler me crawled up into the rocking chair all by myself. As I started rocking the chair back and forth, at least according to tradition, I uttered the words “Harry gone bye bye.” Everyone was apparently stunned by my revelation because how would a two year old understand that Harry had passed? I say now that it was clearly obvious that I’ve had a connection to the dead for a very long time….wouldn’t you say? On a side note, when Mildred passed away in 1998, at the age of 100, I received that rocking chair and to this day I keep it in my kitchen.
Mildred’s gift of these Christmas elves had a very special meaning to her, and it was right of my mother to treat the gift respectfully even if we all thought the elves were hideous. The elves meant a lot to Mildred, and giving them away must have been a sacrifice for her. That point as we age when we realize we can’t keep holding on to every material thing we’ve clung to, and therefore hope to pass these things on to someone else who would enjoy them.
Mildred was the youngest of five children (according to her birth certificate) born in the late 1800’s to a lumberman and his wife way up in the north woods of Maine. Working in the remote lumbering camps in the 1880’s and 1890’s was hard work and would have been even harder for a wife and mother who had to manage a household basically single handedly while her husband was away all winter. Into this kind of environment Mildred was born in 1897 in an area of Maine so remote that it did not even have a town. Mildred was born in T4 R8, officially that’s called Township 4, Range 8, in Penobscot County. Her mother died in childbirth, leaving her hardworking lumberman husband with motherless children. How many of those five children I’m not exactly sure. Seeing as I do family research I tried to find more about Mildred’s siblings but because of the remoteness of the area and the time period I was only able to locate information regarding two of the others. Mildred’s parents had been married in 1882 and a son was born in 1885 named Fred. Another child, Izelle had been born in 1890 but died in 1894 of diphtheria.
After the death of Mildred’s mother it appears that Mildred was sent to live with a family in the town of Patten. She’s listed as a “boarder” age 3 on the 1900 census living with a family with the last name Muncy. Her father, Frank and her twelve year old brother Fred are living a whole day’s travel away, further south, in Twin Lakes, near Millinocket where they are both working in a mill. If there were other surviving children I was not able to find them. By the time Mildred is 12 years old she has been reunited with her father and is living with him and his second wife.
Sadly, this wouldn’t be the only difficult time in Mildred’s life. I’m sure she married Harry McEwen with all the high hopes and love that young couples have. Harry was a salesman for a grain company and they clearly did well financially as was evident by the massive home they resided in on Bangor’s 5th Street and all the photos I’ve seen of their travels as a retired couple. But in between there Mildred and Harry suffered greatly. For some reason they struggled to have children. I don’t believe I ever heard of an exact number but I do remember learning that Mildred had several miscarriages and even lost a couple of babies to stillbirth or death immediately following birth. It wasn’t until 1926 that Mildred and Harry finally had a child that survived, Kenneth.
It was Kenneth who sat with her in the picture on the fireplace mantle in Mildred’s home. She so much younger looking then I ever remember her being. That 1920’s look about her with her short cropped hair and dark rimmed glasses. Kenneth was an adorable child, big saucer like brown eyes and a head of curly hair that truly made him look like all the other cherubs that filled Mildred’s living room walls, their little wings carrying them up towards heaven. Because you see even though Kenneth survived his infancy, he died from scarlet fever at the age of seven in 1934 and passed on to heaven himself. So it was, forty years later, that Mildred gifted two Christmas elves from Kenneth’s childhood to my mother. It must have been a monumental sacrifice for Mildred, a woman who had lost so much in her life, now in her own final years realizing that she must part with the things she had clung to.
From my childhood one of the elves came with me into my own adulthood, and as I pointed out I have hung it, Kenneth’s Elf, from some knob or another every Christmas. It certainly isn’t because I think it’s an attractive Christmas decoration. It’s more because it just feels right to hang it up. Every year, as I hang it up, I say “Merry Christmas Kenneth.” I don’t know why, it’s just a tradition. My sister has the other elf and she too has always hung hers up, much to the chagrin of her own children. Neither one of us really understanding why we are so attached to these creepy, truly ugly elves, that belonged to a child we never met, but yet we kept doing it anyway.
About ten years ago I went with a friend to a group reading held by a medium. Totally skeptical, not going to lie! But I figured I’d mark it off the old bucket list. I found the man truly fascinating and came home to tell my sister about my experience. She wanted to meet this man as well and so I scheduled a time for her to have a private reading with the man at his home. I drove her out there and sat in a chair along the wall as this man spoke to my sister about things that were important to her. I was just the spectator here. As we prepared to leave though he said he had one more message but it was for the two of us. He then described a small boy who had been very sad, but he wanted us to know that he was thankful to us that he had never been forgotten. I remember walking silently to the car with my sister, getting into the driver’s seat and both of us shutting the doors in unison. Then we looked at each other, across the center console and shouted “KENNETH!” at the same time.
I don’t know what my connection is to Kenneth, a young boy I never met, and honestly someone I only think about once a year when I hang up this ugly elf. But I will continue to hang that elf every year so long as I live, and I will continue to tell his story to my grandchildren and my own children who have forgotten it. And now I have shared Kenneth’s story with all of you.
Merry Christmas Kenneth, you have never been forgotten.