I thought I have forgotten what the real Christmases were like, but, I remembered.
Christmas comes but once a year, made up of equal parts of love, good cheers, gentleness and humor. The Yuletide feast that descends with the full gamut of holiday moods — from tender reminiscences to rollicking jollity, to new thrills of recognition and delights of new discovery — with remembrance and affection for that forgotten glee.
On Christmas Eve, the children in their best clothes linger and watch the most alluring bundles after bundles under the Christmas tree, waiting breathless with aching little hearts. The presents didn’t belong to Christmas Eve, they were for the morning, so the small people have to go to sleep in order to wake up very, very early!
And wake up early, they did. They shuddered out of their beds, trembling with cold and excitement into their frocks which, being girls, were very complicated affairs. With polishing of cheeks and brushing of hair, they tumble down the stairs into the warm cozy family room.
The pith of the party is reached on a Christmas morning. The festival that belong to mothers and fathers and children as certainly as love and generosity — all over the Western world, it’s not the time to talk about situations, or conditions or reactions or people who emerge briefly into the news. This was what Christmas was like before people came home in airplanes, oh so long, long ago.
But there’s the family rule that gifts are never opened until after breakfast (Presents on an empty stomach were bad for temper and digestion). The first sight of the family room was wonder. Presents, stockings knobby with unknown delights, packages everywhere, on tables and chairs and on the floor by boxes marked “Do not open until Christmas.”
Presents of such indeterminable shape, they cannot be hidden, so as more and more children start to shiver with excitement as they jumped into their choices. Their most thrilling moment was when each offering came to view and the recipient screams, “Just what I wanted!” Or another saying, “How did you know I wanted a pen holder?”
Among the elders, books simply meant sheer images. Inside the covers of books were everything — everything that exists outside the word of today — lovely, lovely words of poetry, that slipped like colored beads along a string, tales of rose red cities, half as old as time. All that men can imagine and construct, and make others imagine, at least once in Christmas.
I’ve seen Christmas grow, on any clear night, when the stars snap like sapphire with the cold, and the big moon flooding full; over Des Plaines and lighting up the snow spruced boughs like crushed diamonds.
I remember every holiday that came along my father’s house, which was a gathering of our clan. Christmas was the whole assembly, relations in squads, special guests that had to have the best of everything, and mother saying, that Christmas to her, is watching the people eat.
We always had a Christmas the size of all our own with the whole nation in a three-hour dinner until everyone swelled; eating themselves into a coma, with a lot more of delicacies parceled to the members of the clan. It was going from one thing to another.
The secret of the best Christmas, my mother said, is everybody doing the same thing at the same time. Like there would be so many hands at work on the trees: everybody hanging the presents on the tree at once (everybody knows whose giving one what) turn around and take the presents off again, with the small children sitting around with anxious aching hearts.
Our kind of Christmas is when most of the cards were drawn and handwritten. When presents are all stowed, heaped and tucked away, with surely no gifts to match anyone’s.
Then beyond exhaustion, the little girls lay and dream that the world was wide and beautiful, filled only with hearts or warm and hands as tender…and the spirits as generous, in the only way, the children would ever know.
The elder offered, as ever and always, something of far greater value — their gift of the heart, in every act of kindness carried out in the name of the clan.
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E-mail Mylah at [email protected].
