— by Margie Doyle —
Those of us Boomers, born 1946-1964, can’t help but have had an “ideal”, Norman Rockwell-Donna Reed Christmas image burnished in our memory of what Christmas celebration is all about – family, faith, and festivities.
But for my family, Christmas is different every year, and the memories that linger are often of the weird and untraditional – full of wonder in their own unique way.
There were the years in the 1960s when we would wait for all my brothers, serving in the Army, to juggle their Christmas leaves. We’d make multiple trips to Sea-Tac airport on Christmas Day, awaiting Christmas Dinner and present-opening until 9 at night. There was the year that my brothers’ “Irish” got the better of them and pictures show them seated around the dinner table with black eyes, my Mom’s smile a little tight-lipped.
The Christmas after my Dad died, with my Mom at a brother’s in California, I got a hired as a day laborer, delivering Candygrams all around Seattle. As a university student, I was struck by how many people greeted Christmas morning hungover or still-partying.
The next year, my Christmas “break” job was writing personal loan offer notes for Dial Finance. The loan amount was for $40 (!) and I remember the tagline – “Dial Dial.” I also remember coming to work in my chartreuse mini-dress and purple lace-up boots, hungover and nauseous, and the kind, frumpy secretary offering me a peppermint candy cane for my “stomach troubles.” It worked.
The Christmas where I was immersed in domesticity and mailed a huge box of homemade presents and a gigantic box of baked goodies, before boarding the flight with my two little ones and my beloved cocker spaniel mutt Goldie for a week at my big-hearted sisters’ home.
That was the Christmas where the toddling baby walked up to the shiny ornaments on the Christmas tree, and with his baby grasp, pulled the Christmas tree over on himself.
The next year, we had another baby, and rented a port-a-crib for his brother to sleep in. The adults had gathered around the Christmas table when we head wails from upstairs. Running upstairs, I found that the fold-up bottom of the crib had broken through, and, although his feet were firmly on the floor, the baby was clinging for dear life onto the bars of his crib. What some kids will do to sit at the big table.
Another unexpected but beautiful memory was when my husband couldn’t make it home for Christmas, and my trailer park neighbors came over Christmas morning with a tray of champagne for me and a gingerbread house for my kids.
One year, when my Mom was old and unable to drive, but my teenage sons were, they brought her — on time! — to the Christmas music performance where I was singing. Their love and respect for their Grandma, and for me, was the brightest light of Christmas that year.
In recent years, my daughter and I traveled to Amherst, Massachusetts, where my son was attending college. He and his fiancée were vegetarians and they had no car, so the “tradition” that year was taking the bus to shop for a turkey breast for two of us, and ingredients for vegetarian lasagna for the other two, knowing that we’d be walking/bussing home with one plastic shopping bag for each hand. (We still managed the plum pudding and Christmas crackers that polish off our Christmas Dinner.)
That was the year we had two unexpected guests, students from Princeton, working in the synthesis of the scientific and the spiritual came over because their furnace had gone out in the 5-degree temperature.
There was the year my daughter begged off on celebrating Christmas with the family as her best friend had lost her brother and just wanted to “get away” from traditional family Christmas celebrations. That reminder of my daughter’s compassion and generosity were the best “gift” a mother could have.
Do you have memories of “weird” or untraditional Christmases? Would you share them with us?
And may we wish you peace, light and serenity every day of the year.
Loved your stories, Margie! As a member of a large Irish family I have many stories too. My favorite is the year my mother unveiled her brand new, shiny automatic clothes washer/dishwasher. It was a Thor, and you changed the tubs when switching from clothes to dishes. After the huge dinner with aunts and uncles and cousins, we all watched agog as the tipsy menfolk wrestled the clothes tub out and the never-before-used dish tub in, then the equally tipsy ladyfolk helped scrape and load all the dinner dishes. Then all refilled their highball, eggnog, and beer glasses and retired to the living room for MORE stories as Thor filled through hoses attached to the sink faucets. Suddenly amid all the laughter “there arose such a clatter” from the kitchen, crashing and banging and gurgling and splashing! Men, women and children scrambled across legs and wrapping and presents to see what was going on. Thor was on a rampage, ramming the dishes back and forth, blasting them with water, spinning and shaking. Upon unplugging the angry Viking, the lid was raised and there in soggy shambles were tiny bits and pieces of every single dish, cup and glass we and our dinner guests owned. To this day my brothers and sister and I cannot hear the name “Thor” without collapsing in giggles over the Christmas Thor invaded our Irish celebration!
So wonderful to hear these, Margie & Micki!
One Christmas, when my girls were about 9, 10, & 14, we gathered in the living room of our Victorian house in MA to hear my husband read “Child’s Christmas in Wales,” by Dylan Thomas, while we filmed the action, portrayed by the girls and the oldest one’s boy friend, Tim. Whomever felt moved by Dylan Thomas’s descriptions would step forward and act it out. Tim needed much prompting, as he had never “acted” anything before. We finally got him to be one of the uncles: “trying their new cigars, holding them out judiciously at arms’ length, returning them to their mouths, coughing, then holding them out again as though waiting for the explosion.”
All three of the girls, however, jumped in numerous times…one of the best being when there was a fire at Mr. & Mrs. Prothero’s house: “…we ran down the garden with snowballs in our arms… Mr. Prothero…was standing in the middle of the room, saying ‘A fine Christmas’ and smacking at the smoke with a slipper…..’Do something’, he said. And we threw all our snowballs into the smoke…”
I no longer have the video of that long-ago improv; your imagination must fill in the rest of the scene….
HAPPY NEW YEAR