Memories of Holidays Past

With Christmas just a few days away, my mind if full of memories of the holidays I have celebrated in the past.  (And according to my jeans this morning, my stomach is full of Christmas treats from this present December.)  I thought I would share a few of the more delightful ones with you this week.

Several of my favorites involve my sister, with whom I spend every holiday. When we were much younger, my sister dated a fellow who had a farm.  As a gift, he gave her a pig.  Not a pot-bellied pig.  A real farm pig.  Mildred.  She was cute, as pigs go. My sister loved pigs, so she was very smitten with Mildred.  When Mildred was a baby, she would ride around in her car and go through the McDonald’s drive thru for hash browns, her personal favorite.  But Mildred was a real pig, so she did not stay car-riding size for long.  Eventually she became pretty much farm-bound.  Then one year on Thanksgiving, my sister and her boyfriend decided to load Mildred up in a big van and bring her to my parents for lunch.  By this time, Mildred was pretty close to full-size.  My parents lived in a regular neighborhood.  There were houses all around.  Luckily, they did have a fenced-in back yard.  Around lunchtime, the van pulled up in front of the house and the back doors opened, and out came Mildred- a full-sized pig.  I cannot imagine what the neighbors thought.  My sister herded Mildred to the back yard and she found a grassy area that she liked.  I am sure that the farmer boyfriend knew, but none of the rest of us was prepared for the rooting.  Pig snouts are powerful!  Mildred made quick work of all of the grass.  She was like a power tiller.  She plowed through everything with her snout, oinking away the entire time.  We gave her two or three pumpkin pies and she make quick work of those, too.  I was a little surprised that she didn’t eat the aluminum pie tins, but she didn’t.  They were left in the mounds of dirt that were what was left of the yard.  When lunch was over, and it was time to load Mildred back up, she was one dirty pig.  I was really glad I did not have to clean out the van after that trip.

When my maternal grandmother was still with us, but quite elderly, she would come to my parents’ house on Christmas morning for a few hours.  My mom and dad would pick her up from the skilled nursing facility and she would sit in a glider and open presents and eat with us.  She was blind and had very limited mobility.  To add to this, she was a tad particular.  Even when she was younger and had her sight, buying her gifts had been a real challenge.  There were literally like four things she liked and my sister and I argued over who got to buy her each item.  As she aged, that list dwindled down even further.  We were to the point that I bought her new nightgowns and robes and my sister got her scented soaps and lotions.  This Christmas was the same as usual, Grandma opened her gifts and fussed that the gown I had gotten her was too long because I had not purchased a petite.  Have you ever shopped for a petite knee-length gown and robe?  This was before Amazon.  It will make you curse.  Then she opened my sister’s gift bag of lotion and soap.  After gifts, there was always this lull before lunch where we tried to entertain Grandma.  She had dementia, so it was really quite difficult, but we did our best.  My sister decided that perhaps giving Grandma a big ol’ squirt of her new lotion to rub into her hands would keep her busy for a bit, so she squirted some onto her hands.  We watched as Grandma rubbed, and rubbed, and rubbed.  It didn’t appear to be dissolving.  Actually, it appeared to be lathering up.  After several minutes, my husband picked up the lotion bottle that my sister had used.  Not lotion.  She had squirted a big gob of soap onto my grandma’s hands!  Grandma is practically immobile, so we cannot just get her to the sink to rinse off the soap.  We had to get a pan of warm water and a washcloth to get all of the soap off of her hands.  But do you want to know the really funny part?  My sister did the exact same thing the very next year AFTER we had warned her not to squirt soap!

My mom had the most unique wrapping system that always made for interesting Christmas mornings.  Bless her heart, my mom did not have the easiest go of it during the holidays.  She disliked shopping, decorating, cooking, going to festive parties, and wrapping presents.  Pretty much the opposite of me.  So when it came to wrapping the gifts she had not wanted to shop for in the first place, gift tags were just taking it one step too far.  She decided that she would just choose a different wrapping paper for each person and wrap all of his/her presents in that paper.  The idea is very sound, and I know many people have used it with great success.  The problem was that my mom could never quite remember who had which paper.  Nor did she always stick with the same person’s paper for all of his/her gifts.  Some years, she made a key.  That was always a good sign.  Some years she did not.  I rather preferred the years she did not.  It was great fun to see my dad open up a box of ladies undergarments.  I also enjoyed the years when we had to open up one present from each paper to see which paper belonged to whom.  I really miss that.

I will end with a sweet memory.  When my children were little, we always sprinkled reindeer food on the front lawn Christmas Eve night.  I can still picture them in their little Christmas pajamas and slippers throwing handfuls of glitter and oats out onto the grass.  One year when my daughter was about three, we were getting her dressed on Christmas morning (in what I am sure was an adorable Christmas outfit) and she looked down and saw little specks of glitter and a few oats on her bedroom carpet right at the foot of her bed.  Her eyes got big and round and she looked right at me and said, “Mommy!  Do you see that?  Santa’s reindeer must have come in my room to watch me sleep!”

I hope you can see Christmas with the eyes of a child this year.  It will have to be a choice you make.  Just like the memories I chose to share.  Not all of my Christmas memories are happy ones.  But I focus on the happy ones.  I choose joy.