Memories of Christmas Past
Thoughts on the Season
I have been through 68 Christmas seasons. I don’t remember the earliest ones. I am able to remember spotty details from those early times in my life. Like how my daddy’s whiskers felt when he needed a shave. Sharp, sharp, sharp! I remember the tight, awful feeling rubber leg holes on the plastic pants I used to wear over my diapers. I remember the feel of my crib, the square wood slats. But those memories are flashes for me, and Christmas does not feature in them.
I do, however, begin to have Christmas memories starting when I was about ten years old. My mother would save all the Christmas cards that were sent to us. She made ornaments out of them by gluing clothespins on the back of the cards. Our trees always had a bunch of those up. There were precious glass ornaments wrapped with old, crinkly tissue paper. There were a bazillion tiny lights that were slung on the tree. That was my father’s job. He also got the job of putting the tree up.
My favorite was the string of bubbling lights. There was a slender tube with a flower at the base. As the light warmed up, you could see bubbles dancing the length of the light.
I remember the tinsel we hung on the tree. My mother insisted on putting it on strand by strand, but when she wasn’t looking, we would hurl handfuls at a time at the tree. My father would join in, and when she caught us, he would deny all wrongdoing and blame it on us kids.
I can remember making construction paper garlands with the white school glue that came in little pots with a brush when we were kids. The kind of glue the kids would eat at school every chance they got.
In the early years of our marriage, my husband and I continued the tradition. We had cats then, and I remember coming home to find ornaments all over the living room floor in our houses. We stopped using tinsel the year Samantha walked by one day with a piece of tinsel trailing out of her tiny little cat butt. Not to worry. She lived until she was 18 years old.
I also switched from using glass ornaments to satin ones. Then, it didn’t matter if the balls towards the base of the tree ended up everywhere but on the tree. Picture this: a fully decorated tree on top and a bare tree on the bottom two feet.
It was normal, too, for us to occasionally come home and find the tree lying on the floor because somebody tried to climb it. There were a number of years when I wired the tree to the wall and then to the ceiling.
Now, Dennis and I don’t put up decorations. We got out of the habit, though we have an evergreen spray or a wreath from the Sea Scouts every year.
There were a multitude of reasons why we stopped decorating. We were both working and as the years went by, we were placed in positions of greater responsibility. The hours we spent at home were often filled with worry and stress that we brought back from our respective offices. The joy of Christmas was put by the wayside for a number of years.
These days, decorating for the holidays is minimal for our family, but there is a festive joy in my heart right now. I changed the background on my computer to show a festive Christmas kitten.
Thanks for reading.