Advent is here, and I got to thinking I would do something different. To get ready for Christmas this year, I would do posts each Advent Sunday on my favorite Christmases past. These are deeply personal stories, and some of the things I will write here are things that, like Mary, I have kept and pondered in my heart. Yet, they are also things I open up each year, on my own, to get ready for Christmas. This year, I am going to share some of them.
I remember the exact moment that I realized this would be the last Christmas like all the previous ones I remembered. On Christmas Eve, it was tradition in our house to gather, my father would read the birth narrative from Luke out of the Bible his grandmother gave him, we'd sing a carol, and then head off to bed. We did all but the heading off, and my mother asked my oldest sister to come to the kitchen and help her with some pies she was baking. As my sister walked off through the dining room, I remember very distinctly thinking to myself, "She's not gonna be here any more." She was getting married just a few short weeks later, in mid-January, 1977. It hit me, at that moment, that Christmas was not going to be the same ever again.
That whole Christmas season is vivid in my memories: the way we had snow all through December, with snowball fights on the way home from school with my friend Mike Hakes; the day I came home from school and my mother told me it was the day to set up the nativity (the special thing set aside for me to do) in the front living room; the morning of December 24th going to the bowling alley with my friend Ken Sindoni; being trapped in the TV room that afternoon and watching old Our Gang shorts and Laurel and Hardy's Babes in Toyland on Channel 11. All these memories became even more important for me to lock in precisely because I knew, at that moment late in the evening, as we three youngest children got our stockings and headed up to bed (and I don't think my brother, then a senior in high school, was pleased to be so treated), that no Christmas would be like this one.
Being the youngest of five children, the feeling of being surrounded by people on holidays was so normal that, when I listened to other people talk about sparse tables and only a few people, I really couldn't imagine what it might be like. Ours was a large, talkative, boisterous family. We laughed a lot, we yelled a lot, we took turns being the center of attention - and giving it as well. Most of all, though, was this sense of permanence, especially on holidays like Thanksgiving, and Easter. Christmas, though, had that extra special ingredient - it was a day just for us, for family. Attempting to recapture the emotional sea in which we lived as children is almost impossible, yet I do know that there was a great deal of comfort, for me as the youngest, being surrounded by this horde of loud, garrulous people, all of whom were my family, and all of whom were particularly amazing each in his or her own way. Since I had only turned 11 a month before, I had no sense of there being anything particularly special about me - except, of course, that I was expected to do well in school and play a musical instrument of one sort or another - so knowing, or at least feeling, that these people, with their abilities in music and school, in the swimming pool and track field, at home to make us all laugh - it was really quite amazing.
My oldest sister, in particular, was one to whom I always looked up. At the end of her first semester of college, my father allowed me to go with him when he picked her up (I was in 3rd grade, and staying out so late on a school night was quite a privilege). When we arrived at SUNY Brockport, and went up the elevator in her dorm - this was the early '70's, and college dorms were all those soulless tower blocks - she wasn't in her room. When we found her, down the hall in a friend's room, her friends all cooed and ahhed over her baby brother. She did something then I have never forgotten; she picked me up and she hugged me and she kissed me on the cheek. It may have been the last time she ever did that. All I know for certain is I have never forgotten it, and I have loved her for it ever since.
On that Christmas Eve, three years later, as she walked to the kitchen to help our mother with some pies, and the rest of us went to bed (well, except for my older sister, also in college, who stayed downstairs), I knew that I had to hold all the things from that particular Christmas season as close as possible. No Christmas would ever be like this one again. The tree was enormous, sticking way out from the bay window in our living room; the lights and tinsel and ornaments were so bright, you didn't need to turn on any other lights to sit and read a book in that room. I remember sitting in what has always been my Dad's chair while my brother visited with his friend Barry Green, a few days before Christmas, looking at the tree and thinking about how beautiful, and bright, and special it was.
I've had other memorable Christmases since then, of course, as you will learn. In many ways, though, this was the last Christmas of my childhood, and the memories, as wonderful as they are, carry a tinge of bittersweet for me. No Christmas has been the same since.
