Advent Calendar - Day 6 Sis's Great Santa Caper

My sister is two years younger than me and has been a spitfire from the day she was born. She was always little for her age, so she made up for that in stubborness and determination. One day whe she was three or four years old, she decided that she was going to catch Santa in the act on Christmas Eve. So she came up with a fool proof plan.

That Christmas Eve, when everyone was tucked in and asleep, Sis started to sneak out of our shared bedroom. I awoke as she tried to pass me and she told me she was just going to the bathroom, so I went back to sleep.

Instead, Sis crept on tippytoes down the stairs and plopped herself in front of the Christmas Tree. And there she sat on the floor and waited for Santa to show up. And waited. And waited. When Mom & Dad came down in the wee hours of the morning to set out our gifts, there was Sis sound asleep, curled up on the floor under the tree! Dad wanted to carry her back up to bed without waking her, but Mom said to just leave her be. So they left her there, sound asleep, and got to work.

Christmas morning, there was Sis under the tree sound asleep, surrounded by our Christmas gifts from Santa!

When we woke her up, Sis was so mad that her big plan to catch Santa in the act had been foiled - because try as she might, she just couldn't win the struggle to stay awake.

Advent Calendar of Christmas Memories - Day 4 Christmas Cards

We had a large extended family, so Mom was in charge of the Christmas cards. She'd buy a big boxed assortment in the after Christmas clearance sales the year before and would start writing out the cards long before Thansgiving so they would be all ready to mail. Some she would send "as is" with just the traditional signature, but in a select few she would include a handwritten letter. It wasn't a generic Christmas newsletter, it was a personal letter to the recipient. Back in those days, a long distance telephone call was very expensive and a stamp was just a few cents, so Mom was an avid letter writer all year long.

Because of Mom and Dad both coming from large families, we also received a great many cards. It was exciting getting the mail! Mom would hang a string or ribbon across the living room picture window curtain rod and we would use clothes pins to hang and display the cards. After the holidays, the cards would be dismantked and Mom would use them in crafts projects she would come up with to keep us occupied on rainy or sick days.

One family tradition we can count on is the first card of the season always arrives from Mom's brother Cody in Upstate NY. He prides himself on mailing them off the day before Thanksgiving each year, so his cards always arrive on Black Friday or the next day. He wants to be sure that his is the first card of the season we receive. Everyone else in the family holds off mailing until after Thanksgiving so that Uncle Cody can retain his place of honor in the Christmas Card stakes.

These days, my card sending goes in waves. When money isn't so tight, I'll send cards to everyone in my address book. Years like 2010, I will just restrict myself to immediate family and a very few others. Postage rates add up too fast to be casual with my card list in these current economic times. But I still love getting cards!

Advent Calendar of Christmas Memories - Day 3 - Eclectic Tree Ornaments

Growing up in the late 1950s and 1960s our tree didn't look like something from a magazine or store display, all matchy-matchy and color coordinated. Thee was no overarching theme - it was truly eclectic. It had - personalty.

Lights: In my youngest years, we used the large bulb strings of light. As the years passed, we moved into the small twinkling lights; always multicolored and never the plain white strings of light. With our tree, the more colors, the better was the rule. But my favorites by far were the strings of bubble lights. I could watch them for hours. We even had a candelabra in the front window that was outfitted with bubble lights.

Most of our ornaments were a mish mash assortment of the old blown glass balls and figuruals. Many of the balls had indents with kaleidoscope patterns in the indents. There were glass balls that looked like berries and birds, Santas and bells. We had many glass ornaments that looked like Chinese lanterns. The tree lights would reflect upon all these ornaments and really make them sparkle and come alive.

The rest of the tree was outfitted with homemade ornaments and whatever caught our fancy. Of course, back then there weren't cartoon or TV character decorations. A favorite for many years were ornaments my sister and I made in Sunday School one year. They were stars made from wagon wheel pasta glued together, spray painted (mine was silver, Sis's was gold), sprinkled with glitter and had a mini Christmas ball glued to the center. How those lasted intact for so many years was a tribute Mom's packing abilities when everything was taken down and put back into storage for the next year.

When I was a kid, I wanted a "designer" matchy-matchy theme tree (what I imagined were rich peoples' trees). Now that I am older, those trees seem so sterile. So it is a hodge podge, eclectic, theme free tree for me. Long live Personality!

Advent Calendar of Christmas Memories - Day 2 - Holiday Foods

In my family growing up, Christmas Day was spent at home with my parents, siblings and myself. Extended family visits took place on other days leading up to Christmas, but that day was for our nuclear family. So our Christmas dinner wasn't as elaborate as Thanksgiving, when we would gather with extended family.

Since Cookies and Dinner are Advent Calendar discussion topics for later in this month, I'll focus today on what foods were special to us that don't fall into those categories.

At the top of my list were the bowls of mixed nuts in their shells that Mom would have sitting around. These never made an appearance any other time of the year, but in the lead up to Christmas, there was always a bowl of nuts and a nutcracker sitting on an endtable in the living room. Sometimes it would be just walnuts, but usually it was mixed nuts. Since there was some effort needed to crack the nuts and dig out the nutmeat, we were allowed to snack on them at will. As kids we never went crazy gobbling them down because we lost interest in cracking them open after just a few nuts and our attention would turn to other things.

Everyone had their favorite type of nut they would dig for in the bowl. Dad went for the walnuts, I liked the brazil nuts. My sister liked the hazelnuts, or as she called them, "acorns".

Another Holiday treat was Ribbon candy. My father's aunt generally gave us a box of it every year. Now that was a treat that Mom would parse out because otherwise we'd gobble up the entire box in no time! I loved the thin crackle of the delicate hard candy.

And I can't forget about the candy canes! They were everywhere! We'd hang them on the tree and eat them as snacks or even dessert. Mom would get the little canes each individually wrapped in cellophane. Back then they came in one flavor - peppermint with the classic red and white stripes. OK, occasionally we'd score a green and white stripe peppermint cane, but they were hard to come by. Today's tutti-frutti kaleidoscope colored  candy canes just don't seem right to me. That's not how candy canes are supposed to look and taste!

Now I have to run out and buy some mixed nuts and ribbon candy. You readers are a bad influence!

Advent Calendar of Christmas Memories Day 1 - The Christmas Tree

When I was growing up in the late 1950s and 1960s, Christmas was a magical time of the year and the centerpiece was our Christmas Tree.

My family didn't put up a live tree in those years. We weren't a family that trudged out in the snow to select a live tree, only to set it out as trash after the celebrations. No tromping through the woods, tree farms or corner tree lots for us. No, for us each year sometime just after Thanksgiving, Dad would retrieve the box holding the pieces of our artificial tree out of storage and assemble it (I think the assembly instruction must have included some colorful language LOL). I always assumed we never had a live tree because Mom didn't want to deal with the mess (and cleanup) of all the dropped needles that comes with having a live tree. Looking back, I know now that Mom and my baby sister had serious allergy and sinus conditions that would have been aggravated by spending so much time with a live indoor evergreen tree.

Our tree was a good sized tabletop tree, maybe 4 feet high. Every year my Dad would set up a large HO train platform on a pair of sawhorses and the decorated Christmas tree would be the centerpiece on the platform. I'll write more about the Christmas train display in another post, but this was the reason our tree was a tabletop sized tree. Sitting on the platform, the tree topper almost, but not quite, reached the room's ceiling.

We always decorated our tree with tinsel, never garland. Funny because as anti-mess as my mother was/is, she said it wasn't really a Christmas tree without tinsel. Mom said that garland was for people too lazy to take the time to hang tinsel properly.

Although we all helped to decorate the tree, when we were all finished with the decorations it was Dad's job to place the crowning touch - a mercury glass tree topper (the kind with the bulb and spire shape) on the top of the tree. I once asked why we didn't use a star or angel or one of those flashing light tree toppers that I'd see in the stores. I was told by my parents it was because that tree topper was like the ones they both grew up with and that's what we use in this family and no, we were not going to change. I decided that I was going to have a glitzy tree topper when I grew up. Only thing is now I choose to use a mercury glass tree topper because that's what I grew up with and any other topper doesn't seem like Christmas.

It's funny to realize that the older we get, the more we value tradition.