Christmas Eves

My Mom at the piano many years ago

My daughter, Erin, goofing around with her flute

Brother Dan

Brother Stanley

Son, Christopher and grandson, Nick, about 22 years ago

Me and my Dad singing together

Everything evolves and that includes Christmas traditions. I was thinking about this coming Christmas Eve, only 3 days from now, planning the dinner, making sure all the gifts were wrapped, putting up a few more decorations to make the house look nice. Our tradition now is small, reflecting the size of our immediate family now--at least those that are here in the area. It's just my Mom, my brother, Stanley, my husband and me. Christmas Eve is a nice dinner and a movie. This year's dinner will be baked ham and the movie will be The Christmas Story, the one in which the kid shoots himself in the eye with his new bee bee-gun and the turkey ends up on the floor. It's not as sentimental as some, but it will be fun. We used to play games but Mom can't remember the rules anymore, so now we rely on a movie to add a little spice to the evening.

It's a far cry from the big crowd of relatives that used to stuff themselves into my Grandma and Grandpa Ammon's little front room down on Charleston Street. Aunts, uncles, cousins, eating Grandma's tarts and fudge with raisins, drinking Aunt Carol's punch out of her Depression Glass cups, lining up on the sofa for pictures, laughing, singing while Grandma and Aunt Carol and my mother played carols on the big upright piano. We all looked forward to the evening and I'll never forget the year I had Strep Throat and couldn't go. I sent my husband and my little girls, anyway but it wasn't the best Christmas for me. Those raucous, festive gatherings ended when my Grandpa died and my Grandma sickened and ended up in a rest home.

The next evolution in the Christmas Eve tradition became a gathering at my mother's house. But it was Grandma Ammons who had kept the family together and after she was gone my Aunt Beth and her children celebrated at their home and my Aunt Carol was only an infrequent participant at my Mom's house. For several years we'd gather for chips and dip, Christmas cookies and punch, to which Mom always added ice cream or sherbet. Dad made eggnogs for the ladies and stronger drinks for the men. Mom played carols on the piano and sometimes we'd sing along. But it just wasn't Grandma Ammon's house and we all felt we'd lost something. Then my Mom had an idea that we were resistant to at first. She wanted us to entertain each other with a Musicale. We were all asked to prepare a song to sing, or play and to perform it on Christmas Eve. This seemed a little hokey and contrived, but we wanted to make Mom happy, so we complied.

I think we started this new tradition in the mid-eighties. My mom would always play something on the piano and since she could play by ear she would do her renditions of White Christmas or The Christmas Song or Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas and carols, too. She would sing and Dad and she would sing together. Mom had and still has, a clear, beautiful soprano voice and Dad had a nice baritone. He liked to sing a carol like Silent Night more than the popular Christmas tunes. I tried to sing something unusual, searching my big Christmas songbook for a couple of months before and rehearsing for weeks. It wasn't always easy to get my kids involved, but when Christopher learned to play the clarinet and the guitar he joined in. Erin was married and living in Seattle when we started doing the musicales but later she joined us with her flute and her husband, Kent, who played the piano. My brothers were always enthusiastic participants. Both performed music in their everyday lives--Dan was a sometime street performer and a choir director, Stanley played in a band--so their contributions were often hard rock or jazz. None of us will forget the year Dan took it into his head to teach us all the structure of a blues tune. We almost decided the musicales were dead after that! He went on for the longest time, talking about lines A and B and how they repeated in a predictable sequence , leaving us all yawning and restless. It was less entertainment than lecture.

But most of the musicales were as they had been intended by my Mom--we entertained each other with interesting performances and there was more of a point to the celebration, not just chit chat and snacking, though there was plenty of that, too. One year, sad over the end of my marriage, I couldn't bring myself to sing, but I'd been taking Tai Chi classes and my performance was a demonstration of what I'd learned, more like a dance than an exercise.

My Dad died in 2001 and though the Christmas Eve get-togethers moved to my house that year and thereafter, we put together our musicale--my brother and I sang a duet, my other brother played his guitar and Mom played and sang carols. We tried it again the next year, playing Balderdash afterwards, bending over with laughter, but the following Easter my brother, Dan, died and when it came time to decide what to do at Christmas our tradition evolved again. The era of the musicale was gone. The food changed to a full dinner, we played games for a couple of years and then, as I said before, Mom couldn't remember the rules, so we moved on to showing movies. I miss the big family gatherings of my younger years, and the musicales of my later years, but life changes and we change how we celebrate along with it. The thing is to keep celebrating.

My husband brought home the December 22 page from his Stupid Things People Say calendar today and it seems apropos:

"Look now for glad and golden

Hours come swiftly on the wing

O rest beside the weary toad and

Hear the Angels sing."

These are lyrics for "It Came Upon A Midnight Clear," as printed in a brochure for a Redmond, Washington church. I am sad about that weary toad. He must have had an awful lot of shopping to do.