Christmas past

Okay, so much for posting daily, but sometimes life gets in the way. I was going to write about my most vivid Christmas memory, but I couldn't narrow it down, so here are memories of Christmases past.

When I was a little girl, my mother would bake and decorate Christmas cut-out cookies to hang on the tree to supplement the ornaments. I also did this when the boys were young, before I had so many ornaments. The boys always thought it was great fun to be able to eat the ornaments off of the tree!

On Christmas mornings of my youth, my father always took home movies. We were never allowed to begin opening presents, until he had the lights and the camera set up. I remember many Christmas morning, begging him to hurry up. Of course, we had to then open up presents, one at a time, and hold them up for the camera.

When I was newly married (in my first marriage), we lived on the fourth floor of a tenement building (no elevator). We were pretty strapped for money, so my husband told me not to buy a Christmas tree. He told me that we wouldn't even be home for Christmas (we were going to both my parents' house and his mother's). I was appalled to think we wouldn't have a tree. The week before, I walked three blocks to the tree lot, while he was at work (we were sharing a car at the time), bought a small tree, dragged it the three blocks home and up four flights of stairs (considering all, it held up pretty well). My aunt had given me a tree stand and some old ornaments that I used. We argued about it when he got home (one of our first fights, but not the last), since I had defied his wishes. However, we had his daughters on Christmas morning and he thanked me for it then.

The first Christmas in our first house, was actually spent at my mother-in-law's house. Our furnace went out on Christmas Eve and our house was freezing. Due to the holiday, we couldn't get a repairman out until the day after Christmas. (Despite the way it sounds, we really did have some lovely holidays together.)

When the boys were still both at home and I was a single mom, we always went to the candlelight service on Christmas Eve. When we got home, it was usually after midnight and we would open one gift apiece before we went to bed. One year, I bought us all laser tag vests and guns. I made sure that those were the gifts that everyone opened that night. We ended up running around the yard after midnight, in the snow, playing laser tag. I think we finally got to bed about 2:00 am.

I have a lot of European glass ornaments that I have collected over the years. One of them is a pickle. The tradition is that after all the gifts are opened, there is one more surprise gift. Whoever can spot the pickle (hidden somewhere on the tree) first, gets the extra gift. They still expect me to have a "pickle" present.

The demon cat, that we still have now, has a bow fetish. She stalks the presents under the tree, stealing the bows and ripping up the paper. I now wait until Christmas morning to put the gifts out. But, the first year we had her, before I knew, we woke up Christmas morning to find that she had "unwrapped" all of the presents.

So...what is your favorite Christmas memory?