Trainwreck-Celebrating Holidays as a Wiltsey – Part 2

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.