Christmas 2009

Like I said, no way I can top Claude’s true story, but some Christmas memories are:
Going downstairs very early one Christmas morning, to go potty, and seeing a Howdy Doody doll on the tree. It had to be mine, and I knew I had to leave it there, and I don’t remember if I successfully was surprised enough at it or not.
My mother always made clothes for us for Christmas presents, and she seemed to always be up so very late on Christmas Eve finishing everything – after we grew up and weren’t there any more, she used to want to just sit and relax on Christmas Eve, she said that was making up for all the years she didn’t get to.
We always had one present to open on Christmas Eve, usually it was something to wear to Midnight Mass, that the good Catholic aunts came to get us to go to. How magical that was, to be up that late, and to have the ritual of the full mass.
We would open our stocking presents and then go have breakfast before we opened the rest. My parents would milk the cows and so nothing could get opened until they were done and in the house. When we got older sometimes we would get up with my father and do the milking, and I remember one year he got me up, and we milked and then on the way to the house he stopped at his service truck and said ‘we have to bring this inside’. It was a stereo for my mother for her present and I was so thrilled when he said he got me up because he wanted me to be the one to help carry it inside. Of course I was being a brat about having to get up before he said that. That stereo, btw, is still up in the Indian Lake house and the last I knew at least parts of it were working fine. I know I listened to the radio part of it often up there.
My mother would write a poem for us every year. She told us that on Christmas Eve at midnight, the animals were able to talk, and she would go to the barn and write down what they had to say. She got every animal into that poem, and they always had something to say about what they had done that year, especially of course the ones who went to the fair, and especially if they won prizes. I don’t know how she did it but those were treasures that I wish someone had the sense to keep. I tried once or twice, but it wasn’t the same with just a couple of cats.
The family would get together at the old family home, even after my grandparents were gone (they both died when I was fairly young). The kids had to eat at a card table, there were so many of us, and sometimes it even was put in another room – but somehow the aunts always knew when we were not minding our manners.
One of my favorite presents was a Roy Rogers western town, with tin buildings, corral pieces, animals and of course Roy and Dale. I kept that all through high school, and had a shelf in my room that I used to make different arrangements of it on; I had Lincoln Logs too, and made buildings, and added other pieces through the years. My mother finally sold it in her antique shop, but she later found the Dale Evans figure from it and gave to Stephen, but he said I should keep it because he would loose it, so it is on my bookshelf now.
When my sister and her then husband were living at the farm in Connecticut, one year we were supposed to go down there on Christmas Day but it started snowing real bad and so we started a ‘convoy’, Sara’s father and she and I in our car and my parents in the Saab they had then, I think we got there at something like 2 in the morning. Jeanie and Dick were still up putting toys together. Can’t remember if it was the same year, but one year they got Penny a pony and I remember walking out to the barn with her and how big her eyes got when she saw it.
I don’t remember doing the late night put toys together thing, but maybe I just never got Sara anything that needed it.
I love Christmas, the lights, the preparations – I love thinking of things to give and then seeing if people really like them. This year I tried to be practical –my sister and I decided we both have enough crap and don’t need more, so we are doing donations. And I did one for the family to the Land Conservancy, ‘From the Peduzzi family, in memory of Grampy and Grammy’ – they’d like that, they’d have liked the idea of land being kept for farming or wild for people to enjoy.
Like Christmas music, too, but I don’t especially like that stations start playing only that before Thanksgiving, it gets old before it’s time.
I’m listening to ‘Melodies of Christmas’ now, an area tv station produces it, with the Albany Symphony and with a chorus selected from schools throughout the area, it’s an honor to be chosen for it. The music is beautiful, always something different. They give the proceeds to the children’s hospital. Really should go to it in person some year.
This Christmas I didn’t decorate a whole lot, because I am going out to see Stephen the day after, and tonight I am packing in between listening to the music. Tomorrow Sara will come down and we will open our things, then she will go off to some friends and I will go over to my step-daughter’s and then to my niece’s – and then home to finish packing so I can leave as early as possible on Saturday – depending on the weather, of course, they are predicting rain/ice/sleet/who knows what.
Then there was the time that my father got the ‘bad peanuts’ when he and some other guys from work stopped on the way home on a Christmas Eve, but maybe that should be another story. As should the newspaper Christmas party my sister and I were both at.
Merry Christmas to all!