The ghost of Christmas past haunts me regularly as the calendar winds down from December 1 to the 25th. Like Ebenezer Scrooge in Dickens’ timeless classic, that ghost shows me happy times: family dinners, birthday cakes for Baby Jesus, toys, and a state of sustained chaos starting around 4 o’clock Christmas morning and lasting throughout the day.
I come from a family of eight children: six girls born between 1958 and 1967 and then two boys born between 1972 and 1977. Christmas always was a very noisy, disorganized and generally satisfying holiday — my favorite time of the year for much of my life. When my parents moved to Tecumseh in 1957, they bought a house at 604 Cairns Street, where I spent the first 9 years of my life. My sisters all were born when we lived in that house, although the youngest three girls have little memory of the Cape Cod house with the big bay window.
We all loved Christmas. My youngest sister, Anne, remembers crawling out of bed at 4 a.m. to run into the living room and see what Santa brought. By then, we were living on Gove Court.
“Nothing was wrapped,” she recalled. “There weren’t any gift tags. But somehow, we knew which gifts were ours.”
My parents bought most of the gifts we received from Santa came from the Gambles Store, now Martin’s Home Center. If there were any electronics, like the stereo I received the year I turned 13, or the cassette player my sister Carol got that year, it came from Wolf’s TV and Appliance. Later on, they would shop at JC Penney and Sears for our hearts’ desires.
Christmas morning also meant birthday cake. Mom would make a layer cake, frost it and stick a candle in it and we would gather around the little creche under the tree and sing out, “Happy Birthday Baby Gee-SUS,” extinguishing the candle on that final syllable.
Dinner usually was ham, sweet potatoes with little marshmallows and brown sugar, Brussels sprouts, and corn. How my mother was able to do all of this on just a couple of hours of sleep I never knew.
But the ghost of Christmas past also brings memories of sad times, like the first Christmas without my sister Carol, whose funeral was four days before Christmas in 2002. That Christmas, we had a new family dynamic to master. We overspent that year, trying to rub a balm of gift-giving over the wound left by her passing.
For me, the great melancholy of the holiday is not because she is gone but that I wished my days with her away as if they were dandelion seeds launched by my breath and carried away on the summer wind.
My sister loved Christmas. She loved shopping, choosing presents for her daughters, getting gifts, being with family. She probably loved being with me more than I loved being with her. I was rather a mean sister at times and I should have been kinder.
Fortunately, Christmas is all about second chances and the opportunity to make new memories with family and friends, and remember those we shared Christmas with as children. I’m sure there were many times when my parents were worried and stressed, but I don’t remember any of it. I just remember the excitement, the magic, the love. I know the Christmas of my childhood is gone and my sister, too, but the memories each Christmas comfort me and draw me into the circle of love that is my family.
SQUIBS 