Happy Christmas Decoration Eve

I walked in my friends' home last night and saw they had already decorated for the holidays, and I felt the butterflies in my tummy because it's not December 3rd yet.

In a family of four kids, my parents tried their best to preserve the identity of each child and make sure they felt special and cared for individually. My brother Russ was born on December 2, so Mom and Dad would adamantly disallow any Christmas decorations to be up in the house or out in the yard until December 3rd. Until that day we were welcome to submit our wish lists to Santa and talk about what we wanted, even underscore our points with pictures we cut out from magazines, but under no circumstances were we allowed to put anything that was red, green, silver, gold, gold-plated, or in any way jingled and/or jangled in a manner fit for a holiday spectacle where the general public could see until the day after we celebrated Russ' birthday. Not the night of the 2nd. The morning of the 3rd.

Once our family started decorating, we also had mandated placements and decorations that were not up for deviation. Mom would arrange the cardboard cutouts of the Christmas ice skaters on the double closet doors in the main hallway, Matt and Russ would decorate the main pine tree in the front yard. I would put up the plastic stained glass cutouts on the big front window, and then we would all bring up the Christmas books and puzzles Mom kept on the ping pong table that served as the year-round groaning beast of burden for her holiday hoard.

Overnight, with a little help from the kids, Mom turned our ordinary house into a magical wonderland that was sure to make Santa blush. I lived for that time of year. I think Mom did too. She was so busy taking care of everyone else all year, whether they were her kids or her parents or siblings or husband, that I think this was a time she could call her own. She takes care with everything she does and Christmas calls for meticulous methods. She taught me how to hang tinsel one strand at a time to make the tree look like we harnessed a moment of winter and brought it inside to enjoy for ourselves. She could tell you every ornament she hangs on her miniature tree and where to find it. She not only believes in Santa, she makes sure others know he is real, too.

I still keep this tradition every year, though I've lived on my own for quite some time now. Even in the dorms when I was in undergrad, I explained it to my roommate who was completely understanding of this hold the 3rd still had on me and we waited until that day to set up our little tree and Christmas lights around the room we called home.

I haven't mentioned the family tree yet. I'll save that for another time. In the meantime, I'm going to make my wish list and wait with quiet anticipation until after we've wished Russ a very happy birthday to hang our stockings by the chimney with care.

Club Nights

My mom is a small fairy godmother of a woman who carries a mad rumpus with her wherever she goes. She's a wee sprite with a penchant for laughter who was my first exposure to quirkiness, and the most enduring.

Every month Mom would meet with seven other ladies from the neighborhood to play pinochle, eat delicious dips and munchies (made by the indentured hands of her children), and talk about what joys and disappointments their families were. Each club member would take a turn as hostess, and the party rotated from house to house so that we would host this hilariously bawdy bunch of women every eight months. It was the one night we were allowed to eat all the hors d'oeuvres we could keep down, and to stay up late for my mom's special raspberry dessert.

During Club, my brothers and I would be banished to our rooms to do homework, or to my parents' room to watch some spirit-breakingly boring special on PBS with our dad while the ladies whooped it up with their coffee cups full at 9:00pm and Virginia Slims blazing in the living room. I was mainly resentful not because I wanted to be in the living room to participate in the card games and big girl conversations, but because that's where they kept the dip and appetizers for a main course that would never come. I was often in charge of hunting and gathering "dinner" for the bedroom dwellers because I was the smallest and had the best chance of going unnoticed. In order to get to the food, I would have to make it past the perfume and 80s beehive gauntlet. And the hugs. Oh Lord, the hugs. It seems that every single one of them had huge chests and an endless supply of polyester blouses. Let me tell you, polyester lives to soak up White Shoulders and Charlie.

Most of the ladies were the coolest folks you could ever hope to meet with kind and generous hearts tucked in their gravity-defying bosoms, but there were a couple doozies that made Florence Jean Castleberry look like the lost courtier of Queen Victoria. They would talk about their latest hot dates with the local Cleetuses to the dismay of all in earshot. No detail was left to the imagination, and inevitably they would reach the pinnacle of their sordid tales of woe while I was scooping up a plate of olive dip for the PBS crowd.

Today, I still make a meal of appetizers when given the opportunity and have committed those dip recipes to memory, much to the delight of my coworkers and party going peeps. Though I never learned how to play pinochle, I surely did learn how to laugh. I think of those days often and wonder what my own kids might learn from my candid conversations with my girlfriends and my openness to quirky lifestyles and bold personalities that I inherited gratefully from my mom. I hope for their sake they're able to grin as widely as I do when I think of my own mother, her club, and the cries of "Hokey Shit!" at one o'clock in the morning on a school night. And if not, well, I hope they learn to like the riveting drones of PBS on a Wednesday evening.