 |
Christmas was a magical time when I was growing up. Yes, my family shared mountains of gifts, but the main reason the holiday was great is because we not only loved each other but loved being around each other, so every gathering was a loud bit of crazy fun.
I’d wake up on Christmas morning and immediately head to the tree, where unwrapped gifts from Santa were waiting for my sister and I. Even when I was a teenager and began to doubt the whole one-man-flies-around-the-world-in-one-night thing, I still had unwrapped gifts under the tree, a tradition that continues today through my children and grandchildren.
We’d eat a quick breakfast while waiting for my grandmother, the world’s greatest human, to arrive; after all, she was responsible for the majority of colorful boxes carefully wrapped under the tree. She would come to our house first to watch the proceedings before she went to my cousins’ house, which clearly meant we were her favorite. The wrapping paper carnage left in our wake was a gift for the dogs.
Today, we patiently await for my kids and their kids to arrive around noon on Christmas Day, as we do have to share them with in-laws. We slowly go around the room – youngest to oldest – and open presents one at a time, taking care to note who each gift is from and properly appreciate it before moving on to the next person. It has taken us as long as four hours to finish the gift exchange when there’s a full house. And our dogs still love chewing on, wrestling with and otherwise destroying wrapping paper.
As a kid, we’d immediately take our best gifts to a friend’s house in order to show them off and find out what they got. If we were lucky, the gifts would mesh and we’d have something new to play; if we were really lucky, we wouldn’t break our gifts before dinner. By midday, we were famished and ready to eat.
Some things never change, even when they don’t make much sense. For example, I’m still not sure who said we should eat holiday dinners in the middle of the afternoon and why we followed their advice, but such is life both then and now. I’m also not sure why turkey and ham are still the official holiday meats, but they do at least taste like something special is going on; it’s all about the gravy anyway.
A half-hour later, belts unbuckled, we’d lean back in our seats and watch A Charlie Brown Christmas, the Laurel & Hardy classic film March of the Wooden Soldiers or later A Christmas Story – or whatever parade or sporting event happened to be on the tube, as our eyes were droopy with tryptophan residue, our bodies exhausted from so much excitement.
It didn’t seem like a Norman Rockwell portrait at the time – this was just what my family did – but as the years have rolled on, I realize now just how good I had it then, as I never really thought we lacked anything. We may have been a bit poor in money, but we were rich in spirit.
David Brown is publisher of the Cherokee Scout. Call him at 828-837-5122 or email dbrown@cherokeescout.com.
Quote of the Week
“My plan this Christmas Day is to get up early, jump into the cold English sea, meditate and then go to church. By the time I get home the household will be awake. After opening presents we will have lunch and there will be conversations, agreeable and disagreeable. Later, we’ll walk on the beach, and when we return to the house there will be more eating and drinking and laughter and conversation, which, no doubt, will be considerably less agreeable.
“And somewhere, amid the feasting and joyful human messiness – this beautiful, this happy, this sorrowful estate – I will acknowledge how extraordinarily fortunate my family and I are to have this good Christmas Day. I will remember, too, amongst all the making and the doing, the energising principle around which this day revolves that speaks so eloquently of rebirth and renewal, and the end to waiting – that of a mother bearing a child in a stable, revitalising the world for all eternity.
I wish you all a merry Christmas and a happy and peaceful New Year.”
– Musician Nick Cave