None of that diminishes the fondness with which I hold many of my Christmas time memories. I'm just a bit of a realist and recognize that childhood memories (mine, at least) tend to get exaggerated over time. So while my fondest Christmas memories (and I think those of most people) tend to be the oldest, I really think Christmas is pretty awesome today as well.
I say all this only as an unnecessarily long preface to a few reminiscences of Christmases past. I'd like to share them in the hopes that you might have some similar experiences to share, or at least some pleasant memories of your own to enjoy.
Christmas as a kid usually meant lots of time with my grandmother. My mom's mom lived nearby, and would usually stay with us over the holidays, and keep us kids while school was out. My dad's parents lived further away, and while we usually saw them for a short visit over the holidays, I had nothing like the same degree of time spent with them. Gramma's presence, as with most grandparents, meant we were spoiled rotten. Among other things, this meant anything we wanted for breakfast was fair game. I could probably have asked for lobster thermidor and she'd have found a way to do it, but invariably I asked for nothing but french toast for breakfast for the whole of Christmas break. We also had a seemingly endless supply of "Gramma cookies" - homemade sugar cookies cut into Christmas shapes and sprinkled in red or green. For a special treat, we'd get an occasional pan of homemade cinnamon rolls which made Cinnabon look like the mass-produced, overly-sugared lumps that they truly are. Really, it's kind of no wonder I was a chubby kid. Food is awesome, and the homemade variety doubly so.
We didn't have many huge traditions. I don't recall caroling as a family, no big Christmas letters or Christmas cards with pictures of the kids in their Sunday best (I fought tooth and nail against my Sunday best on Sunday, let alone on other occasions), and we didn't have elaborate light displays on the house a la the Griswold's. We had a tree, of course, and in later years we had a small secondary fake tree set aside specifically for mine and my dad's Star Trek and Star Wars ornaments. The Death Star v. Borg Cube debate raged even then in the midst of an artificial evergreen microverse, complete with lightsaber sound effects and Spock hailing the Enterprise with "Happy Holidays" from the shuttlecraft Galileo. But I digress.
In the weeks before Christmas, it was traditional for me to take every opportunity to snoop for my gifts in every nook and cranny of our house. My parents weren't stupid, however, and either used a hiding place I couldn't access without being noticed (like the pull down attic) or kept all of our gifts at Dad's office until they were wrapped. I usually only managed to discover wrapped gifts, and wasn't quite bold enough to attempt the unwrap/rewrap game. Only once did I manage to discover what I was getting ahead of the big day, and that was through no particular cleverness on my part - an instruction manual was left out from where my parents had the foresight to test and make sure my present actually worked. Unfortunately, I made the discovery in plain view of my parents, which nearly cost me the present. Now that I am a parent myself, I finally understand what got them so upset. Not so much the spoiling of their big surprise as the sheer stupidity I showed in asking "what's this?" when the perfectly obvious answer was "it's the instruction manual to the gift you've begged and wheedled for over the past six months." They were undoubtedly furious that they had wasted so much effort over the preceding years on a high-achieving moron. If Olivia demonstrated that lack of subtlety, I'd probably ask whether she needed to be held back a grade.
At some point every year I recall hearing the Charlie Brown Christmas Special on in the background. The Grinch, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Clay Lump, and even the rather forgettable Garfield Christmas special made occasional appearances as well. I don't recall seeing any of the "classic" Christmas movies like "It's a Wonderful Life," or "Miracle on 34th Street" until I was much older, but "National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation" and "A Christmas Story" did get some occasional play. Growing up in South Carolina, Christmas very rarely meant snow, but on the few occasions where we got some December flakes we took full advantage, sticking a carrot in an 18-inch pile of dirty ice and calling it "Frosty."
We went to Christmas Eve services at church every year. I enjoyed that more than most church services as a kid because they let me, yes, me, play with fire. Well, a candle. Christmas morning usually involved me sneaking in to the living room as early as possible to spy out whatever Santa had brought (Santa's gifts were traditionally left unwrapped). There was no explicit rule about waking the parents up - just the general understanding that if you wanted to enjoy your Christmas presents at all, you would let them lie abed until the unreasonable hour of six a.m. or so. I do fondly remember the Christmas I received a Sega Genesis (I was not an SNES kid, and we can debate their relative merits in another post), which had quite kindly been hooked up for me in advance. I'm not sure how early I got up to snoop on my presents that morning, but I'm fairly confident it was in those wee hours that blur the lines between "too late" and "too early." In any event, I had not been playing terribly long when my dad came stumbling in, sleep-blind and in desperate need of coffee, five more hours sleep, or both. Rather than sending me back to bed though, he sat down, and we took turns running Sonic the Hedgehog off of cliffs.
My dad had as much talent for the Sega's three button controller as I have for the 60-button fiascos that come with modern consoles. But we had a blast. I did anyway, and he at least humored me.
There are lots of other good memories I could share - Lights at the Zoo, listening to Christmas music on the radio until you wanted to puke, the elaborate nativity scenes of some of our neighbors, and Monopoly-based brawls with cousins while visiting family out of town. This last was not so much a Christmas specific memory as a fact of every family gathering between the ages of 6-12, when someone had the clever idea to ship the Monopoly board to Jimmy Hoffa. There were some rough Christmases too, of course, like the year Gramma passed away, along with several other beloved family members. There was the Christmas Eve in college where I very nearly totaled my truck on the way home from Columbia. Still, no one was hurt, and the honey-baked ham in my floorboards was unscathed. Vehicles can be replaced, but those hams are expensive. There have been some pretty incredible Christmases in more recent years too, like five years ago when Christmas came a mere five days before the Fiancee became the Wife. That was a great year, and a great celebration.
Now come the memories we get to make as parents. Our perspective on Christmas over the next few years will undoubtedly be world's apart from the perspective Olivia will have, (for starters, our perspective is about five feet further from the ground) but I look forward to helping shape her memories and experiences of this time of year, and creating some traditions of our own.
We have already decided to nix the egg-nog gallon challenge, and I'd recommend you do the same.
Merry Christmas, everyone.
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