Non-food Holiday Memories

chuckle_bunny wrote: »

There is a photo of me as a kid cutting down a Christmas tree, which, btw, is something my ethics do not align with now that I'm in adulthood. I had this cheesy grin on my face, a hacksaw in hand, and my maroon hoodie looked way too small on me because I put the hood on, which makes the sweater scrunch up. Sleeves were almost up to my forearms and my shirt underneath was sticking out so much it looked like a dress. Hilarious.

When I see that picture though I think of all my hopes and dreams and wonder where they all went. Ever see a picture of yourself as a kid and it's almost as if that person was never you? Hmm. Anyway, that's one of three pictures of myself that I can tolerate. Every time I visit my parents I try to swipe a few pictures that I'm in out of the family photo albums to set flame to later. I don't want to leave behind any traces of myself on this planet. Happy Holidays.

I find the fact that you want to erase all traces of yourself from this planet, very sad. Every single one of us is an important part of the whole world. I wish you cared about yourself a whole bunch more than you appear to.
Obviously I don't know you, but you are one poster that makes me laugh a lot. Whether you know it or not, you have many many gifts left to offer the world.

My strongest memories are my dad driving my brother and sister and me 250 miles to my grandmother’s house in California. Just being in the back seat, memorizing the scenery and struggling to stay awake to savor every moment of the precious visit with family who, though quite reserved emotionally, expressed and felt love for us in ways my mother never has been able to.

Those roads are indelibly imprinted on my brain and I love long drives to this day.

Unwrapping Christmas presents under the tree, then wrapping again before mom got home.

Growing up, Black Friday was the day the Christmas decorations went up. My mom and sister and I would haul all the Christmas stuff out of storage. We'd assemble the tree, Mom would wrap it in lights, and then my sister and I would go through all of our lovingly-packed boxes of ornaments and reminisce about when and where and from whom we got each one. We'd do the same thing in reverse every January when the time came to put all the decorations away again, carefully wrapping each ornament in paper towels and packing them into cardboard boxes - some of those boxes and paper towels must be older than I am.

The tree got more and more chaotic and colorful every year as we accumulated more and more ornaments. No two ornaments had anything more in common than being owned by our family - no cohesive color palette, no curated aesthetic, it was just a big, glowing rainbow monument to our family's collective past in the living room every December. At some point, when it's safe to travel again, I want to visit my mom and raid her ornament collection for my own tree - I have a few favorites, and she has a few that were given to me specifically by friends in college that I left in her care while I wasn't able to decorate my own space.

I have a memory of the tree itself, too. Around 1995, my family was in the market for a new (artificial) tree. We went to K-Mart and found one that was the perfect size and price. The sales associate told my mom that the display model was the last one in the store, so she offered to buy that one, volunteering to take it apart and pack it up herself. They let her, and she's had the tree for 25 years now.

I was too young at the time to remember this myself, but I'm told that as a wee bab, we'd go driving around looking at Christmas lights, and I would helpfully point out "Mo' wites oba deh!" (more lights over there) - I would have been around 2-3 years old at the time. Baby Me is quoted often at holiday time when there are, indeed, mo' wites oba deh.

My mom will insist otherwise, but there is video evidence that the first Christmas gift I ever received was a dog toy. It was a big, dimpled, yellow squeaky rubber ball, mom - in what universe is that not a dog toy?

Edit to add: Among our other Christmas decorations is a Nativity scene featuring porcelain figurines that my mom and grandma hand-painted together sometime in the 70s. It's a lovely set, you've got your Mary and Joseph, your baby Jesus in his little cradle, an assortment of livestock and your three wise men, all in a little wooden manger. Bafflingly, there is also a bag of glittery white cotton batting to represent snow, and a few snowy plastic pine trees, because as everyone knows, Jesus was born in the Pacific Northwest. Probably 8 years ago I added a tiny sign to the entrance of the manger that says "You must be this tall to view the Savior. Thanks, -Mgmt" and my mom didn't notice until she was putting it away that following January. She's left it in there, though, which I appreciate.