THE PRESIDENCY: Green Christmas

Upstairs and downstairs and into the First Lady's chamber went two workmen last week, lugging shiny green holly wreaths, one for each window of the White House. Downstairs all was Christmas rush. Bookkeeper Henry Nesbitt listed stacks of early gifts; Housekeeper Mrs. Nesbitt thumbed over the State linen, bargained with tradesmen, checked the storeroom's loaded shelves of cans and bottled goods. The cook pirouetted with dignity around the 24-foot electric stove, carefully sniffed the game rack, where hung pheasants, quail, ducks, grouse, and woodcocks waiting till they were high enough for a President's taste.

In the mailroom clerks stiffened their sinews to grapple with the hundreds of thousands of cards and gifts—from fruitcake and ship models to luggage and buck deer—that stack up every year, the week before Christmas. Secret Service men could infinitesimally relax: Christmastime is a slow season for cranks & crackpots.

By plane and train from all over the U. S. gathered the Roosevelt clan, some two dozen strong—with newest grandson, eight-month-old John Roosevelt Boettiger, coming East to take his first look at his famous grandfather. Ready as always was Grandmother Eleanor, her activities for the holiday week scheduled to the minute—six public Christmas tree ceremonies, three religious services, three celebrations in New York City, three separate White House children's parties.

Ready were the traditional red stockings that every Roosevelt, child and grownup, hangs over the fireplace in the President's second-floor bedroom. On Christmas Eve, after the children have kissed "Grandpa" good night, the elder Roosevelts stuff the stockings. Into each toe goes a toothbrush, a nailfile, a gaily wrapped bar of soap—vestiges of a custom that Mrs. Roosevelt began, as a sugar-coated reminder of cleanliness, when her six-footer sons were little tads.

On the vast, waxy-gleaming floor of the East Room, where Mrs. John Adams once hung the White House wash, stood an enormous Christmas tree. This was the public tree, trimmed in white snow and white lights. Upstairs in the second-floor corridor stood the family tree, brilliant with colored balls, candles only on its fire-proofed upper branches, out of children's reach. Below it will mass breast-high stacks of family gifts.

The White House Christmas settles into its stride on Christmas Eve. In the afternoon the President will make a brief national broadcast, and light the National Community Christmas tree. After dinner Franklin Roosevelt, a longtime lover of Tiny Tim, reads aloud to his family Charles Dickens' Christmas Carol.

As soon after dawn as is seemly, the pajama-clad small fry whoop into "Grandpa's" bedroom, bounce on his bed, shout "Merry Christmas," and dive for the bulging red stockings hanging from the mantelpiece. After breakfast (smoked sausages and scrambled eggs) the President and the immediate family motor around old Lafayette Square to the grey granite St. Thomas Episcopal Church.