So goes a phrases of one of my favorite songs of the season.
We are now in the final countdown to Christmas.
For some, all the hassle of the season is over. The house is decorated, both inside and out. Gifts are bought, wrapped, and either hidden
or mailed. Baking is finished—with lingering
odors promising an abundance of cookies, not to mention the nut rolls, pecan tassies,
pies, and other sweets destined to tickle the taste-buds of family and friends. Now it is time to sit back and enjoy a cup of
hot chocolate or a glass of eggnog, soft music floating through the house or
Christmas programs on television, a crackling fire in the fireplace…
For the rest it is the realization that there are only FIVE
DAYS to get everything done! It is a
time of hastening to get all the above completed so that on the Big Day we can finally
relax. It is the rush of traffic or the
crowded airports so we can be home with family. Or that last trip to the store for eggs needed
for that batch of cookies promised to the third grade teacher. A time of pushing and shoving in the stores to
get “just the right present.” Or perhaps
the harassed lament, “I’ll be glad when Christmas is over!”
In my early days, I remember that around the first of
December, Mother would take down the summer window dressings and hang the
winter curtains. There were usually one
or two of the couch pillows that were covered in the same print made from the
left-over scraps when Mom sewed the curtains.
Window sills were usually adorned with candelabra and pine boughs with
extra glass balls laid on the branches.
A lighted village was usually on top of some piece of furniture.
There were very few “fake” Christmas trees, so trees were
not put up and decorated after Thanksgiving dinner, as they often are now. About a week before Christmas, my dad would
go to the woods and cut down a tree and bring it home. It would sit on the front porch until a
couple days before Christmas when he would bring it into the house and set it
into a mop bucket filled with coal.
Sometimes string anchored to a window frame was needed to help keep it
straight. And we always had to remember
to “give it a drink” each morning so that it would last to New Year’s Day. Along with lights, we used the ornaments we
three girls had made in school over the years as well as real glass balls to
decorate the branches. Then we’d hang several
silver threads, or icicles, one-by-one on each branch. When Dad would turn on the lights, we’d ooh
and aah at the beauty of it all. Then we
would head out to see what our friends’ trees looked like.
Not only Christmas, but all holidays at that time were
usually an individual family event. I do
not remember at any time there being a huge influx of relatives to help
celebrate the holiday. And that went for
all of the families in our neighborhood.
I do not remember my mother doing an excessive amount of
baking for the holiday, either. Of
course, as a child, unless you were involved with the actual cutting out of the
cookies, the licking of the bowls, or the snitching of raw dough, you didn’t
have much to remember. Mother usually
did the baking when we were in school or out playing. All we did was the enjoyable eating!
Over the years we back off on the decorations, and reason
that no one is around to enjoy all that baking, but the presents are still the
things that are important.
But we find our priorities in present giving change, too.
When I was a kid, there was usually one big gift and maybe a
couple small ones. Of course, our big
gift was not an IPod, or a computer, or even our own cell phone, or any other
gift that could put our parents in the poor house for the rest of the year.
Our big gift might be a doll, a game, a sled, or—if we were very lucky—a pair of ice skates. The little gifts might be a pair or two of
socks, a hand-knit scarf, or some other piece of clothing. And we were thrilled to get what we got. If it was a toy, we actually treasured it and
played with it for a long time—often several years…not just for an hour or two
until it was broken. Our parents did not
have the luxury of a plastic credit card, they used cash. And often that cash was gathered over the
year as a weekly or monthly deposit at the bank into a “Christmas Club.”
After we opened our gifts and had breakfast, we would go out
prowling the neighborhood to see what our friends had gotten. By afternoon, we had congregated at someone’s
house and were playing one of the new games or were putting together one of the
new puzzles. In the evening, if we were
lucky enough to have gotten a book, we were reading it while half-listening to
the radio with the rest of the family.
When my husband and I were first married, also long before “plastic
money,” the gifts we gave the family were hand-made. We could not afford to give anything
store-bought. That year, I crocheted
many inserts for pillowcases. There were
two patterns I used. One was a young
girl wearing a hoop skirt, and the other was butterflies. We saved for a long time for the pillowcase
tubing that, at that time, could be bought by the yard. I cut it to length, sewed one end, then put a
pair of butterflies or a pair of girls on the open end of each case and finished
it with a crocheted edging.
I felt very humbled (another word for ashamed) that all we
could do was a hand-made gift, although those who received the gift said they
really liked it because it was
handmade. It wasn’t until several years
later when I, myself, received handmade gifts and prized their value that I
understood.
As we celebrate this season, I hope we remember the greatest
present we have ever received… the gift of God’s own Son. He not only came to us as a baby to grow up
and experience our lives as we do, but He came to show us God’s love for us. And you can’t get any more “handmade” than
that!
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