Christmases Past

Christmas is such a nostalgic time, isn't it?

Every year as the season rolls around, I find myself traveling down memory lane, remembering Christmases past and the people that shared them.

It starts as I get decorations and ornaments out of their storage spaces.  Remembering where I bought this ornament or who gave me that one.  Remembering my mother as I get out the snowmen she made or as I hang the door decoration she quilted.  Remembering travels and the ornaments purchased on those trips.  Remembering.

Throughout the season, more memories flood my thinking.

Baking sugar cookies with my mother, many years ago when I was a child.

Christmas dinners with coconut cake and ambrosia and cranberry tip-tops (still my favorite!) and fruitcake cookies.  I never have acquired a taste for fruit cake, but I loved my mother's fruit cake cookies!

Christmases in the living room at Grandmother Neil's house.  Some children go over the river and through the woods to grandma's house.  I went next door!  Sometimes at Christmas all the aunts and uncles and cousins would be there as well, and we would pile into her tiny living room, which usually stayed closed off to keep the rest of the house warmer, and we would open our presents.  Grandmother loved Christmas!  She loved giving gifts.  As did my mother.  As do I.

Sending Christmas cards is a dying tradition.  (Probably that has a lot to do with the price of postage!)  But I love receiving Christmas cards from friends and family I seldom see.  I can still remember the Christmas card we sent to our friends and family on our first Christmas.  It was red, with a part of the score of Handel's Messiah embossed in gold on the front of the card.  And the greeting inside read "wishing you every blessing as we celebrate the birth of Christ."  I don't know why I remember that, but I do.

And I remember our very first Christmas tree, back in 1972, our first married Christmas.  It was a beautiful tree, a scotch pine, perfectly shaped.  It had hardly any ornaments on it, since we really couldn't afford any!  And by the time Christmas rolled around, it had not a single gift left under it, since we had opened them all long before Christmas Day arrived!

In my childhood we always had cedar trees for Christmas, decorated with large colored lights and lots of icicles.  I didn't like cedar trees then (and don't now) because of how scratchy they were and how the branches were too flimsy to hold the ornaments up.  But I loved the smell, and still associate that with Christmas!

In the early days of our marriage we always spent Christmas Eve with Al's parents and Christmas Day with mine.  That worked well when we only lived a couple of hours from my parents.  As we began to move around the country, we still usually managed to make it back to SC at Christmastime, and so that Christmas Eve/Christmas Day tradition continued.  Eventually, it became more difficult to travel back here every year, so we began trying an every-other-year visit, and that worked until we moved closer.  As our sons grew up and married, the every-other-year tradition has continued, but in a little different way.  We spend every-other-Christmas together, and Thanksgivings together in the alternate years, and so we alternate with the girls' families.  So far that has worked out for us, and so that tradition continues.

Christmas is a lot about traditions.  About where we always put the tree, and what we always eat, and the kind of cookies we always bake.  It's about what we always do together as a family, whether always going out to look at Christmas lights on a certain night, always going to Disney, always going to Christmas Eve service.  Traditions vary from family to family.  But they are part of the fabric of who we are and how we celebrate.

When we lived in Florida, it was our tradition to always attend the Candlelight Christmas program at Epcot.  When we lived in Minnesota, we always participated in the luminaries display in our neighborhood.

One of our Christmas Eve traditions has always been a birthday cake for Baby Jesus, and reading the Christmas Story from Luke's Gospel.  It's a family tradition that continues to this day.

Because Christmas is about memories.  And it's about traditions.  But most of all, Christmas is about Jesus.

"And while they were there, the time came for her to give birth.  And she gave birth to her firstborn son and wrapped him in swaddling cloths and laid him in a manger, because there was no place for them in the inn."  (Luke 2:6-7 ESV)