Dot, do you have any idea how beautiful this seems to somebody who grew up where we hardly ever had snow for Christmas--maybe once or twice in my childhood--once that I remember for sure, but that's southeastern Pennsylvania for you!
I can remember going to the store one Christmas Eve and getting a pair of cowgirl boots. I must have been about 6 or 7 years old at the time. That was the only present frivolous present I had that year, but I didn't care. Just having a tree with lights was enough to make my brother and me happy. I grew up on a small horse ranch in Montana and my Dad raised quarter horses for a while. At Christmas he would hitch up this old sleigh if it wasn’t too cold and we would ride that the Church on Christmas Eve after dinner at Grandma’s house. I always remember how warm and cozy it felt to come home in the sleigh piled high with blankets, singing carols. Then coming around the bend in the road and seeing our house with the lights on and the lit tree in the window. The house would be warm and snug and smell like the delicious things my Mother had been baking.
One year times must have been really hard, because there weren't any store bought presents. My Dad made me a doll house and my brother a bookcase and Mom knitted us sweaters and made fudge and peppermint lollypops. We always had a tree because my Dad and my brother would go out into the woods and just cut one. I remember going to my Grandmother's house on Christmas Eve that year. Her tree was all decorated, and there were presents under it to all the family members. A short time later, my Mother told us she had to go home to get something she had forgotten. While she was gone, my brother and I decided we needed to put more presents under the tree, so we found some empty boxes and wrapping paper. We spent quite some time wrapping those boxes to put under the tree. In each box we would put a note promising a chore or some such thing, so it wouldn't be empty. When we came out to put the presents under the tree, boy did we get a surprise. Santa had been!!! There were toys and new clothes just for us. We knew Grandma had done, but we never said a word.
It's like a real
Little House on the Prairie--and, believe me, I do NOT mean that comment in a snide way.
Anyway, most of my Christmas memories involve my mother; this year will be the eleventh Christmas without her. I was an only child, so I got spoiled rotten at Christmas, even though we were just ordinary working-class folks, living on my dad's factory salary, as my mother generally did not work outside the home when I was very small. It's embarrassing now to think of the money my parents wasted on some of the things Santa brought me.
On the other hand, some gifts were definitely not a waste of money, for example, my Marx "Fort Apache" play set (of course I wanted the largest version in the Sears catalogue that year!
), my Lincoln Logs, and the train set that the Tyco company issued that was intended to represent the train from
Petticoat Junction. And I still have those presents, all from the mid-1960s, and I expect to keep them till the day I die!
One year the Marx company issued a playset based on
The Flintstones--an entire miniature Bedrock in plastic, complete with figures of Fred and Wilma and Barney and Betty. I really wanted one of those playsets--a friend of mine already had one. My mother clearly managed to get the last set in town--it was the display model from one of the local stores! So I got the added benefit of having a display board to set up the town of Bedrock, complete with streets and sidewalks!
The Christmas tree always went up in early December and then came down on New Year's Day--no keeping it up till Epiphany in our house! Unfortunately, by about the mid-1960s, my mother began to get deathly sick every year--she was allergic to the scent of a "real" Christmas tree, and since she was in the house with it all day, there was no avoiding it. Luckily, by the time the doctor ruled that the tree had to go--we had gotten a beautiful Douglas fir that year--they had just invented the "green" artificial trees, the kind you could put lights on. I was terribly worried that we were going to have to get one of those aluminum trees with a color wheel, like my grandmother had--and I hated because you couldn't put lights on it. As far as I was concerned, a Christmas tree without lights on it just really isn't a Christmas tree! Those early model "green" artificial trees were downright ugly, but at least you could put lights on them!
When I was a small boy I also really liked to help my mother with the Christmas baking, and she always baked multiple batches of several varieties of cookies. Check out my mother's recipe for molasses cookies!
Also, Christmas dinner was usually baked ham. I remember my mother saying that a ham was less work--less time in the kitchen--than a turkey, and she wanted to be in the living room with me and my presents, not stuck in the kitchen.
With my mother and all my grandparents gone, Christmas is a pretty quiet affair these days. I've always loved the music of Christmas, and that's still the best part of the holiday for me. The climax of the holiday is really the church service on Christmas Eve. Christmas Day itself is actually sort of anticlimactic--though, over the past few years, my dad and I have been having very pleasant Christmas Days spent with some of his cousins. We will have Christmas dinner at the home of my second cousin and his wife this year, too.
I always set up a table-top model Christmas tree in my condo, and a couple of years ago I began setting up a model train layout on the table under the tree. I also set up a number of decorations that had been made by my grandmother. Once upon a time Grandma did ceramics for a hobby--she even had her own kiln. I now have a Nativity set that she made, and also a ceramic Christmas tree, and a little group of children in Victorian attire singing Christmas carols. Needless to say, these things hold great sentimental value for me.
Since I began participating in medieval and Renaissance historical re-enacting and re-creating, another important part of my Christmas season is our local group's annual "Yule Revel." This year's event takes place tomorrow (Dec. 2). We will all be decked out in our medieval or Renaissance best, and there will be period music played on period-style instruments by our group's Early Music ensemble--who are very good!--and then we will all sit down to a feast prepared from authentic period recipes and consisting only of foods available in Europe--nothing native to the New World.
I will also endeavor to make time for viewing my three favorite Christmas classics, all of which I have on tape:
A Charlie Brown Christmas, How the Grinch Stole Christmas, and my personal favorite version of
A Christmas Carol, the "Hallmark Hall of Fame" version with George C. Scott as Scrooge and a great, predominantly British supporting cast, Roger Rees, Edward Woodward, David Warner, and Susannah York, among others. And that's the Boris Karloff cartoon
Grinch, by the way. I'm sorry, I will
not see the Jim Carey movie, which I consider as totally unnecessary!
No matter how old I get, Christmas just won't be Christmas without Charlie Brown and the Grinch! (God, am I child of the Sixties, or what?
)
The only thing wrong with the Christmas season is that there is never enough time, never enough!
