While the time between Thanksgiving and Christmas has always
been my favorite time of the year, I’ve always remembered it to be mostly
chaos. Growing up I don’t recall
much about this time of the year being particularly relaxing as we were usually
trying to balance our everyday lives with buying a Christmas tree, cleaning, baking,
shopping, performing in school Christmas plays and wrapping presents. This was
also usually the time of year when my parents would decide to put a fresh coat
of paint on the walls before company came.
Over the years, I’ve developed a unique skill of being able
to wrap presents of just about any size and shape without too much
difficulty. This was usually a
result of being the only one who would wrap about 75 or so presents for the
entire family into the wee hours of the morning………even my own. I would as why was I bothering to wrap
my own presents when I already knew what I was getting, but that was a fairly
irrelevant point. Now for most
families, food is a fairly significant part of celebrating the holidays. In my family, it probably attributed to
at least half of the yuletide festivities. Where most mothers might bake one, two, maybe three
different kinds of cookies; that would never do with my mom. She is an incredibly talented baker and
would make probably three to four dozen different KINDS of cookies! And she would make them for everyone:
teachers, friends, neighbors, the mechanic, the doctor’s office, the dentist’s
office (yeah lots of irony there), just about anyone and everyone. She also loved to make gingerbread
houses with elaborate details like stained glass windows, firewood in the
backyard and Christmas trees in the front yard. But when my mom was running
short on time during this season, she would recruit my Dad and I to decorate
cookies into the early morning hours. You see, my parents thoroughly believed
sleep deprivation was an essential part of the Christmas season. I quite often had those vivid images of
sugarplums dancing in my head along with other hallucinations. The only way my Dad and I could finally
get off the hook of decorating these cookies is when we started to ice them with
little messages like “Help Me”, or making the snowmen with “yellow snow”.
But I think one of the greatest character building tasks
that my dad would give my brother and I to do is to test all the Christmas
lights before we hung them outside.
Now this was back in the day when you had the kind where if one bulb was
out, they were ALL out. And it was critical to makes sure all 10 of the 200+
light strands were tested and that all of the burnt out lights were
replaced. That is, after we
untangled the thirty-pound tangled ball that they had morphed into over the
course of the previous year up in the attic.
But all of this is still part of the amazing childhood that
I had, and when I feel that longing to experience the Christmases of my youth,
I just cover my hands in pine sap so they stick to everything I touch for about a week and a half.
