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from Ron and Darla and Yoda the Cat |
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CHRISTMASES PAST  |
They'll gather from the
mists of our memories
of TheColumnists.com
It's now looking as if this will be the first Christmas in many, many years that my wife and I will be spending alone.
Right now we're snowed in and just managed to purchase a Christmas tree from a warehouse where the unsold trees had been stored before going on a bonfire. We couldn't find an organic turkey that wouldn't feed a small army, so we wound up with a tiny "junior Butterball" for our dinner on Christmas Day. We've skipped a lot of the usual trimmings, except the pitted olives. My wife believes you can't have a successful Christmas--or Thanksgiving--dinner without a big bowl of olives to dip into. Now it looks as if we'll have lots of olives left over. It's no big deal, I suppose, because we've certainly spent Christmas alone before, but, fortunately, not too many times recently.
Christmas is one of those holidays that cries out for lots of people around you. But we've discovered that the older you get, the fewer people there are left to arrange around you.
Both sets of parents are now gone. My brother lives in Nevada, my sister in Texas. My wife has two sisters in California and one who lives near us, but who doesn't celebrate Christmas. We have no children of our own and our nieces and nephews are spread all over the USA. The one niece who lives nearby is spending the day with her boy friend.
Ever since we moved to Washington state in 2001, we've had lots of family visitors at Christmas, but everybody was up here earlier in the year to attend the memorial service for my wife's stepmother, who died after a long illness. Blaine, Washington, is right on the Canadian border, so nobody likes to come all the way up here twice in one year.
We live in a resort community, so there's a big buffet dinner we could go to down at the resort hotel, but we're now at the stage of life where the sight of a buffet table groaning with rich food isn't so appealing. We've decided to save the money and just have dinner alone at home on Christmas Day. Besides, the parking lot at the hotel is now a giant mound of snow.
We'll put on our favorite Christmas CD's and try to stay in the proper holiday mood. It won't be easy this time because I know already that the ghosts of past Christmases will be crowding around us, reminding us how much we miss from all the happy times we've had around the Christmas tree, around the piano, around the dinner table.
I knew we'd a tree before it was too late. We've come up with a "miracle tree" many times before. I remember the time in the early years of our marriage when we had very little money and waited so late that all the major Christmas tree lots had shut down. I finally found a lot that had one heavily flocked tree that stood about five feet tall. I paid very little for it and almost didn't get it home in one piece. In those days, I drove an MGB ragtop and the tree had to be jammed into the boot behind the seats. Naturally, it wouldn't fit, but we stuck it there anyway and I drove quite slowly home, with the top down, and the wind blowing fiercely. I believe we spread white flocking all over Northern California that year.
For the first 35 years or so of our marriage, we always had a hassle getting the tree home in our various sports cars. We always had to buy reasonably small trees, usually no more than six feet tall, because we never had room for them in the trunk. My wife and I usually chose trees the way some people choose dogs at an animal shelter: We usually picked the oldest or crookedest ones--essentially the ones most likely to be tossed on a bonfire if nobody bought them in time. Does it make sense to feel pity for forlorn Christmas trees? Absolutely not. But that's the way we are. I guess we're sentimentalists. Sorry about that.
When we moved into our new home in Washington, though, everything changed for at least awhile. Flush with money from the sale of our California home, my various retirement cashouts and an inheritance or two, we found we could afford the very best in trees. What's more, we now live in a house with a living room that's two stories high. That meant we could buy a giant tree, maybe 15 or 16 feet tall, and have it delivered and installed in our new custom giant tree-holder. There was a natural place for it in the curve of our spiral staircase. You could even lean out from the second floor landing and decorate those hard to reach branches at the top.
This year we decided against that. Money has tightened, but the real reason we didn't go for a giant tree is the fact that we now have a cat we inherited from a relative. The cat loves Christmas and especially the ornaments that dangle from branches on the tree. The first year we had the cat, we discovered she could climb right up the outside rim of the staircase and use it to launch herself in flight for a soft landing on the boughs of the Christmas tree. This stunt usually was accompanied by the sound of ornaments breaking. It sounded, in fact, like Spike Jones and his City Slickers in rehearsal.
Yoda the Cat is not unusual in liking Christmas and I'm happy to report that every pet we've ever owned has loved holiday tree ornaments. In fact, one of our annual pleasures is enjoying the nostalgic rush, while decorating the tree, when we come across the favorite ornaments of each of the four dogs--Bandito, Fancy Man, Mr. Bojangles and Casey--that we owned before Yoda came along. We've saved all "their" ornaments--or at least what's left of them. Invariably, they are tiny Santa Claus figures, well-marked by the teeth of the particular dog who carried his favorite from the ornament box to the tree each year.
My parents were not cocktail or wine drinkers when I was growing up, but on either Christmas Eve or Christmas Day, my dad would mix bourbon "highballs" for the adults in attendance. My wife's parents also were only holiday drinkers. Her dad was an expert at making hot egg nog drinks and those were a highlight of the evening after dinner festivities.
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of Bing Crosby was always a fixture at family Christmases when my wife and I were kids. We're carrying on the tradition. |
This year we each may have a glass of red wine with dinner. Neither of us drinks "cocktails" anymore, but my wife has recently shown a deep interest in having one of those nostalgic egg nogs at Christmas and had a hot buttered rum drink just the other night at the resort restaurant, possibly a sign she's going into training for Christmas holiday drinks.
It's funny how our tastes in gifts have changed over the years. When my brother and I were kids, we both loved miniature "army men" and made elaborate and detailed lists of exactly what we wanted. I preferred World War I era toy soldiers, which you could tell by the flat "doughboy" hats on the American G.I.'s and the occasional gas mask. The enemy soldiers were Germans, who had spikes on their helmets. My younger brother favored World War II soldiers.
I don't think either of us has longed for a toy soldier in maybe a half century or so.
But it was a tradition for one of my grandmothers to always find a book for me as a Christmas present. I'll have to say her choices were always right on. I still have my original copies of "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea," "Robinson Crusoe" and "Black Beauty" from the beautifully illustrated World editions for children--and a much less fancy edition of "Gulliver's Travels" from Whitman, which my grandmother signed for me with the note "purchased in Riverside, Calif." My own awkward signature adorns each of my Christmas books: "Property of Ronnie Miller."
As I grew older, I received fewer literary classics and more books that I was sure to read right away, including several editions of Edgar Rice Burroughs' "Tarzan" novels that are now worth much more than Grandma paid for them. Unfortunately, I defaced most of those with my proprietary "Property of Ronnie Miller" autographs. I guess my only hope now is that I'll become world famous in my seventies and fans will be bidding against each other for prize items once owned by the legendary "Ronnie Miller."
My wife once had similar Christmas treasures, but they're now long gone because she had the bad luck to have three younger sisters, who all got their hands on her stuff, probably because she wasn't smart enough to scrawl "Property of Darla Miller" in them.
In my family household, we always opened presents on Christmas Eve, but my wife's family opened gifts on the more traditional Christmas morning. I'm not sure why my family was so contrary unless it was the fact that my mom loved to sleep late and became way too busy on Christmas morning, preparing the big holiday dinner, to have time for the kind of slow, elaborate gift-opening process my family preferred.
When Darla and I found it necessary to start our own Christmas traditions, we cherry-picked each other's family traditions and chose the ones we liked best. For instance, we open gifts on Christmas Eve, a victory for my side of the tradition. We also put smaller gifts in stockings hanging from the fireplace, which was from her family's traditions. We never had a fireplace at our house and most of our stockings were kind of patchy-looking anyway. (Mom thought you should "darn" a sock that had a hole in it, so our socks went on forever. If we crammed gifts in them, it surely would have shortened their useful life.)
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toy soldiers who represented the First World War, like this French tank unit. |
I don't think my family ever put gifts under the tree for the family dog. If we had, I don't think they would have lasted until Christmas. But Darla and I always have wrapped pet gifts at Christmas. It became rather complicated when we had two Welsh Corgis at the same time. They insisted on opening ALL gifts, no matter whose name was on them. That led to a new tradition in which each dog had to have the same number of gifts as the humans had so they would be well-occupied opening theirs while we humans hastily opened ours.
Our last dog, Casey the Pit Bull, sniffed out the gifts that were his as soon as they were put in place under the tree, then staked out the tree, guarding his gifts with a very heightened sense of duty. I've always wondered what might have happened if one of us had mistakenly picked up one of his gifts without his permission. I know that it ended my wife's terrible habit of picking up each of her gifts in advance and shaking it to see if she could figure out what was inside.
I know that this Christmas will have its sad moments as we think of all the family members who won't be there to share it with us.
I'll never forget the time that my gift for my dad was a new sport coat, slacks and the rest of the ensemble. We went to the men's store together just a few days before Christmas and he was like a rodeo cowboy in a beauty salon. My dad was a blue collar working man who never wore anything approaching a suit to any event, except a wedding or a funeral. He had one very old black suit he trotted out for that purpose, cobwebs and all. I had to drag him through the process, but once he saw himself all decked out in a fairly sporty outfit, he glowed with pride. From then on, the challenge was talking him out of wearing his sport coat and slacks every time he left the house.
Dad had no concept of shopping for women's clothing, so he used to just give my mom some money and let her go pick out her own gift. I know Mom was always happy with what she picked for herself, but I always felt sorry for her at Christmas because she would wrap her own gift up with the fanciest paper and ribbons she could find, then open it up when her turn came, feigning surprise.
One Christmas when my brother and I both had paper routes and had some spending money for the first time, we talked Dad into going out with us on the night before Christmas to shop for a dress for Mom. We found one store was still open after 5 p.m. and we picked out a nice "house dress" for Mom, wrapped it and slipped it under the tree without her seeing us. Looking back, I have no idea why she didn't have a heart attack when she found a true surprise package under the tree labelled "To Evelyn from Fred and the Boys."
There were tears in her eyes when she opened the gift. To tell you the truth, I don't know if she ever wore the darn thing, but I know it was the best gift she ever received until my brother and I were grown up and married and had wives who could help us do some real gift shopping for her at Christmas time.
Much later, when I was out of college and supporting myself as a cub newspaper reporter, I pulled together my meager resources and bought my parents a color TV set. It was the first color set in our neighborhood, so it gave them some bragging rights, but I suppose, ultimately, they wished I hadn't bought a used set without a warranty that came in a blond cabinet that clashed with all the dark furniture in their living room.
All these memories will come at me this Christmas, I know, along with maybe a couple thousand more. My wife and I will put on some of the really old Christmas songs, like Bing Crosby's "White Christmas," Nat Cole's "The Christmas Song," or one of the Vienna Boys Choir yuletide albums and make room around the fire for all the ghosts, human and animal, who may not feel like spending this Christmas alone any more than we do.
©2008 by Ron Miller. This column first posted Dec. 22, 2008.
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