Holiday Stories

One of my favorite Christmas memories is from back when I was in 3rd or 4th grade.


I joined the school choir for the simple reason you got out of class to go to choir practice. Not because I could sing or was very religious.


The school choir sang in the church’s Christmas Eve Mass. My sister went to church early for rehearsal with our friends and our Dad took me. I was late for rehearsal that night because I was sitting in the car with my Dad listening to Cheech and Chong’s Christmas skit. We were laughing like a pair of loons.

Then as Mass was right about to start a woman goes walking down the main isle of the church. It was my Aunt. Being in the choir we were all up in the choir loft. I see her and forgetting to be quiet say “Hey there’s Aunt.” Half the church turns and looks as she walks right down to the front of the church to find a seat.




I found out later her car broke down and my Dad went to get her and that’s why she was late. One of the ushers tried to make her sit in the back pew and she refused. She said she came there to hear her nieces sing in the choir and she wasn’t doing that in the back row.

A large part of Christmas when I was a kid was sitting with my siblings as close to the tree as we could get, admiring the ornaments, guessing about our gifts, squinting at the colored lights so they looked like stars. Because my family was so large (nine of us altogether), we opened our gifts to each other on Christmas Eve. My father would sit cross-legged on the floor and pass out the gifts, announcing each one ("To David from Julie! To Mommy from Margaret!"). I still remember being overwhelmed by the sound of everyone ripping paper and talking all at once. Initially my mother tried to make us take turns so each gift could be admired and the giver thanked appropriately, but when you have so many excited kids that's impossible - and IMO, the mayhem added to the joy.

As soon as my parents could get us to bed, they did "Santa" - in other words, they filled our stockings. According to my mother, this took several hours, as she had accumulated and hidden stocking stuffers for several months and first had to find them, then to dole them out into seven stockings. (It was a joke in my family for years that it wasn't Christmas unless Mom overlooked something and presented it to you around Epiphany.) There were always items that wouldn't fit in the stockings, so each of us had a designated spot (mine was usually on the sofa) and Mom would arrange stockings and the spillover very artfully, like store displays. I'd sometimes wake up before dawn and creep into the living room to peek at my display, but I'd never touch anything until someone else got out of bed. We always had a tangerine and a banana in our stocking, if only to encourage us to eat something before we went to Christmas Mass - always a wrench, to leave such bounty behind in order to dress, pack into the car and drive to church. When we got home we'd head for the living room to play with our toys, with Dad riding herd on us, while my mother, poor woman, disappeared into the kitchen to deal with the Christmas turkey.

I had a sudden, very strong memory while writing this: one year all my sibs seemed to have such exciting toys that they had no interest in playing my brand-new Scrabble Junior game with me. I moped into the kitchen to whine to my mother, who was up to her elbows in stuffing. She wiped her hands, helped me set up the board on a corner of the kitchen table, and played the game with me in between chopping and roasting and blending.

Dad is long gone, and Mom is 94 now. For the first time in ages, my husband and I will be spending the holidays with her, and I must be sure to tell her that story. She'll enjoy it. Thanks for giving me the opportunity to remember it, Maze Runner.