Christmas Memories, Christmas Traditions
Traditions. At Christmastime my life is full of traditions.
Things that have always been, since before I knew to know.
What will happen to them, after...?
Christmas stockings. Even now.
Always an apple and an orange and nuts, and small presents wrapped in white tissue paper and tied with red curling ribbon.
My mother did all that for my brother, my sister, and me.
And I have done it ever since.
There has never been a Christmas in my life when that did not happen.
Every ornament for the tree has a meaning.
Some belonged to my grandmother, some to my mother.
Some were given to me as gifts--from childhood friends, from children I have taught, from church friends.
The engraved brass angel my mother had made for me the Christmas before she died...
Some ornaments I made as a child; some for Sunday school teachings, for Christmas at the preschools, some made long ago by our daughter, with her name in wobbly writing on the back.
Package tie-ons that were too pretty to throw away.
The Christmas books--more than a hundred by now.
Every year reading "A Christmas Carol", especially the big, illustrated one given to me when I was six years old.
I still read that one.
Or "The Annotated Christmas Carol", so that I know what everything means, I know all the allusions.
The Christmas stories I read every year, the ones that make me laugh--the ones that make me cry.
The familiar pictures and words and covers.
When I read them, every Christmas collapses together into the one I am in.
And the stories are all new once again.
Christmas movies from long ago and those added in later years: Mr. Magoo, Charlie Brown, the Grinch, Alistair Sim, George C. Scott, "White Christmas", "The Snowman", "A Child's Christmas in Wales", "Polar Express", "Miracle on 34th Street", etc.
Christmas Eve church services... sitting with my family in the near dark, surrounded with candlelight; looking at the poinsettias, the garlands, the big red bows everywhere; singing the old familiar, beautiful Christmas carols--all the verses memorized by now. The drive there and back in the night, and being tucked into bed, holding on to the warmth, the excitement, and the holiness.
Hot chocolate on Christmas morning, with Pepperidge Farm turnovers.
Two bags of M&Ms in each stocking--plain and peanut.
Maple sugar candy.
Some traditions are gone now.
Like opening one present on Christmas Eve--always the presents our Aunt Edie sent because she wanted us to remember her gifts among all the others.
After she died, we didn't do that any more...
My mother "sneaking" into the bedroom on Christmas morning, holding our stockings and saying "ho ho ho!"
We all sat on my bed and opened the stockings.
After she died, we didn't do that any more...
And when I die...will any of this happen any more?
What will be left?
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(Mary M. Isaacs, copyrighted)
