The Christmas season, starting with the great and uniquely American Thanksgiving holiday through well past the first of the New Year and into January was always a lovely and uplifting time. Giving thanks, recognizing the reason for the season, Jesus, and anticipating what a bright and hope filled New Year will bring is an annual celebration.
CHRISTMAS MEMORIES
My earliest memories of Christmas was the smell of a freshly cut pine tree. The needles you would soon feel if you walked barefoot anywhere near those trees. The white sheet that neatly hid the tree stand and served as an efective backgrownd for our presents. My dad’s lovingly and painstakingly decorating with large blue, white, red and green lights and with ornaments used over and over taken from neatly packed boxes that dad meticulously stored in the basement on the top shelf in the old fruit cellar in the basement on the house on Trafalgar Avenue. The crowning star fixed at the top of the tree. Oh, and don’t forget the tinsel which always was the frosting on the cake.
CHRSITMAS GIFTS
It is the anxious anticipation of receiving gifts, wondering and hoping for whatever that characterized Christmas. Getting everything I wanted and maybe nothing exactly what I wanted at the same time. Going to bed in anticipation of the gift and the waiting and waiting until morning and time to open the gifts. Dad usually didn’t open his gifts until after the lunch meal and eventually we joined him in waiting to open our gifts, too. But we never could wait as young children. We always had to open the presents as soon as possible. Uncles and Aunts visited and they were always appreciated bringing practical gifts. .
CHRISTMAS TREES
We always had a real tree at Christmas time. Even when my brother died and my sister and I moved to different parts of the country. I would always come home at Christmas and made sure we always had a tree. In a sense, I guess I never grew up especially at Christmas time. The last few years that my parents lived in their home; I even brought real living Christmas trees with the round ball of dirt wrapped in burlap. After Christmas I took them to my home in the country and planted them. Two of the trees made it. Those two trees and good memories are what remain of those 50 or so Christmases.
Each year those two trees will have an opportunity to grow as will my appreciation of and those and now this special season and that special Person who is the true meaning of Christmas. It was Jesus, who was crucified on a different kind of a tree. Christmas I am finding is a time of giving and not so much a time of getting. . .
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