Thinking....

My Grandma's Card Tree

What do you think about at this time of year, before Christmas and between Christmas and the New Year beginning?  Do you think of the past?  Do you think of people who aren’t here anymore?  Do you remember sounds and smells?  Do you make resolutions?  Do you reflect on your life or your children’s lives or the future?

This year, especially, I’ve been thinking about the past and those people we’ve lost and those that are still here.  I think of my mother, who, as my brother put it the other day, was our Mrs. Christmas.  She loved Christmas, the presents, the colors, the smell of bourbon in eggnog, Spritz cookies with sprinkles. She always wore red and green during the holidays.  She loved the parties, getting dressed up, wearing a red velvet top with sparkles on it, her black velvet pants, her adored ankle boots.  She always sang in church, from my earliest memories and that was a huge part of the holiday for her.  Choir rehearsals, carols, performances.  Her clear soprano voice soared up to the highest notes with ease and joy.  She loved the acclaim and she loved the music.  And Christmas was the pinnacle for her voice and her joy.

I remember Christmas Eve’s at my Grandma Ammon’s house in Charleston, south of the Navy Yard in Bremerton.  She had a house that seemed big, until you got all the daughters and their kids and their kids’ children in the living room.  We were packed in there, and the piano rang constantly with Christmas music played by Grandma, my Mom and my Aunt Carol.  Grandma bustled around with her housedress and white apron on and the butcher knife in her hand, laughing and running back and forth.  She made fudge with raisins in it.  Who does that?  She made pretty tarts from pie dough; round circles of dough with currant jelly, using a thimble to cut a hole in a circle for the top of each tart.  My daughter remembers the “Neapolitan” candy, pink, white and chocolate striped, she kept in a jar.  I don’t know what she was cutting with the knife, but it was waved for emphasis and sometimes we had to duck.  When she was really laughing hard, she’d throw herself down in a chair and fling her apron up over her head, her wild, white hair flying around her face.  The cacophony was wonderful, laughter, piano, singing, little kids playing, trying to get all the little ones on the couch together for a picture, in their velvet dresses, blue and red, lace and ribbons.  There was a tree, but it was small and on a buffet.  You couldn’t get all of us in there with a big tree in the room.

Stuffed into Grandma's House
my Dad hiding behind pillow
Grandpa Ammons with tie and Mom in pink, singing
Cousins and their kids on couch
1967

From Left:  Cousin Dave's 3 redheads, my Erin and Carolyn and Cousin Gail's Janie and Paula
1967

I think of later years, when Grandma and Grandpa were gone, musicales at Mom’s house.  It was Mom's dream to have her children perform at Christmas, and Dad and her, too.  We resisted at first, for a year or two, but finally gave in.  Dad would sing “Oh Holy Night” in his baritone—you could see he was nervous—Mom would play for him and sometimes they’d have to start over, but it always brought a lump to my throat.  Mom, in red or green, would play by ear, swaying back and forth on the piano bench, and sing something popular, an old standard like “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas”.  I have so many pictures of her with her back to us, at the piano, obviously in her glory.  I would practice for weeks to sing something unusual, a Spanish folk tune maybe.  One year, after a divorce I performed a Tai Chi routine and my brother accompanied it on the guitar.  I was too fragile to sing that year.  My brothers usually played their guitars; Dan played his sax, too.  Eventually, to Mom’s delight, we got the grandchildren involved.  Erin played her flute, her husband, Kent, played the piano and Christopher, his recorder or the guitar.  Throat lump time again for me.

Lump in throat time: Dad and I singing

Dad, Mom and Dan are all gone now.  There is no more musicale.  There is sometimes a celebration at my house now, with my children here, but that’s rare.  Mostly, it’s gotten quiet.  This year even my brother, Stanley, was absent; he was in jail.  Mom would have been so sad and I was.  We had our Christmas Eve with "Miracle on 34^th Street", the 1939 version, coconut nog for me, bourbon and Coke for my husband, cookies that his Mom had sent in the mail and some gluten free ginger cookies I’d made for me.  My grandchildren were in Oklahoma, Maine, San Diego and London.  My husband’s nieces, nephews, sister and mom were in Utah and his cousins in Greece and England.   It wasn’t sad so much as it was quiet.  Our little chuckles at the hundreds of letters to Santa piling up on the judge’s dais were nearly silent compared to the Christmas din of years past.

Now that Christmas is over for 2013, it’s time for the New Year to come.  No matter what has been going on at Christmas, whether it’s wild and wonderful as in the “old days”, or quiet as it is now, we have been filling out New Year’s Papers since Christopher was about nine—25 or 26 years.  It’s a time to think about the bests of the year, the surprises, the concerns, the goals for the brand new year coming.  I made a sort of a form all those years ago, that with only minor tweaks, we’ve used since then.  Best movie, best book, favorite TV shows, biggest surprise, worry, best present at Christmas, stuff like that.  And always at the end:  hopes for the New Year.  Each of these papers is a tiny time capsule—I love the ones from Christopher in those young, innocent years.  One year he hoped “to reach the place of strong”.  There has always been a worry, sometimes about the health of a loved one, sometimes about a loved one’s lack of wealth, very rarely about ourselves.  I think this year my hope will be that we can make a different Christmas next year, one that is less about old memories, but more about making new ones.  A trip?  A new volunteer activity? A place we can be around more people?  Something that takes us out of our too quiet home.

My last blog post worried a couple of friends enough that they called me on Christmas.  What they don’t know about me is that I think and I think—that’s part of what makes a writer—and then I write and sometimes I’m in a mood when I think and write.  And that mood came across on the page.  But I’m okay.  I’m just thinking on the page.  And those phone calls were wonderful to get, too.  Thank you for thinking and remembering---me.  Happy New Year!