Soapbox

The Ghosts of Christmas Past

Another Christmas season has finally ground its way to the finish. (I don’t consider Christmas done until "Old Christmas"- Epiphany) The tree is undecorated at last, thank you notes have been written, school is back in session and I’m more than ready to say goodbye to it for another year .

Before the kids came along I was a nurse, so I was always working either Christmas eve or Christmas day, which was a bit of a drag and cut down on holiday visits with family. At first that was tough but after a while, more secure and entrenched in my own new family, I didn’t feel the need to be en masse every holiday.
When Stephen was a year old, Ted and I decided that from then until further notice, Christmas for us would always be at our house. Anyone who wanted to visit was welcome and we would travel wherever before or after, but Christmas eve we spend in our own beds. Julie used to come for a few years- she liked having little kids to spend Christmas with and they adored her. For a few years the family got together later, around Epiphany and did the whole holiday thing: ate too much, played games, exchanged gifts, admired each other’s children, etc. but after a while that got to be too much work too.

Still, Christmas used to be such fun, even though it was a lot of work. I would decorate the house and collect for charities and bake for the neighbors and as choir director I ran the Christmas eve service, so I was always full of "Christmas spirit" as it were. I have some lovely memories of those years- Stephen’s first letter to Santa at age 4 "Dear Santa- I love you. Mary Crismis." ; the Christmas plays Steve and Katie would put on for us, complete with paper Santa beard for him and paper antlers for her; the night Stephen put cookies out for Santa and 10 minutes later we found them gone- I looked accusingly at Ted, he glared at me- and then the dog sauntered by. And of course, all the bizarre, mis-shapen, achingly beautiful little things the kids made me for gifts that I still have tucked away somewhere. (I once made my mom a clay turtle for Christmas in 3rd grade- I bet she still has it.)

Now that I work retail, Christmas is fraught. 3 months of fake holiday cheer and Christmas carols poured in my ears until I think I’m gonna puke red and green just suck the joy right out of it somehow. I hardly decorate anymore, (well I’m surrounded by decorations for months!) and now that I know how much carbon pollution is expelled for every string of lights- why get up on the roof at all? Much as I love them, I’m in no mood to deal with my extended family and their little dramas and power-plays for more than a few hours at a time. So I’m sometimes a bit bah-humbugish about the whole thing for a while.
But usually a few days before Christmas I’ll get the house to myself for an evening, and I’ll make tea and cookies, put on my Bing Crosby Christmas music while I wrap presents and that pretty much de-Scrooges me. My kids (17 and 20 now) are always laid back and pretty easy to shop for, and I’ve learned the ins and outs of buying for Ted which makes shopping less stressful.

It’s interesting to see how my siblings and I have altered our family traditions as they made their own families. When we were kids, the way Christmas was then was the way it had to be! Come downstairs in the morning fully dressed (and carefully coreographed for the movie camera) and eat a big breakfast (oatmeal, grapefruit and Grandma’s raisin bread) before any gifts are opened, and open gifts one at a time! It must be that way!
But everything changes, even if you don’t want it to, and I think my Dad has changed the most of all. The man who took such joy in driving out in the country, tramping overland until we were all half-frozen to select and cut down our own christmas tree- now has a BLUE artificial tree in his living room! I just stared in amazement when I saw it at the annual Christmas dinner party they had last weekend. Who are you? I thought, and where is my father?
In contrast to the cluttered party atmosphere at my Dad’s (the man who hated it when she had "those church people" over), my mother said that this Christmas she had a quiet day. She took a long bath, people called, a few dropped by with gifts and then she sat listening to christmas music and re-reading old love letters my step dad wrote to her long ago. (He died a year ago). She used to have a cookie-decorating party for the grandchildren and later host a big Christmas pot-luck that all the church looked forward to, but when Larry’s memory and her eyes started going, those lovely tradition had to come to an end.

Of all the many and varied Christmas memories I have stored away, I think my favorites are of Old Christmas at Grandmother and Grandpa’s house. The house would be overflowing with cousins and food, noise, confusion and laughter. My grandmother had embroidered the name of each of her children, their spouses and their children on a stocking, which hung from a couple of dozen tiny hooks all around the mantleplace. I remember one year when multiple children were bedded down on the living room floor in front of said mantle, yet somehow in the morning, we would wake to find the stockings bulging. I can just picture the designated uncle tiptoeing through the grandchildren to do the stocking honors.
By today’s standards our pickings that morning were slim, but we were delighted to upend our stocking and find oranges, nuts, the occasional candy and even a small, usually hand-made gift from Grandmother and Grandpa. Even that small offering was no doubt quite an effort for them with 16 grandchildren, but they managed it, and we were very appreciative. On that day it truly wasn’t about the gifts: we got more stuff on Christmas morning, but we had more joy on Epiphany when the family got together.

Today I never even hear from those cousins I used to share the living room floor with, though several live here in town. Sadly, I realize that my own kids and their cousins, who used to have such fun together, rarely see each other any more either. But often, when I fill my childrens’ stockings at Christmas, I think of my cousins curled up beside me on the living room rug, giggling with excitement in the dark, all of us certain that we would never be able to go to sleep.
Merry Christmas, everyone.