Christmas memories
I remember snippets of holidays: one Christmas I received a Garfield the cat journal with a lock and key. It was short, fat, and hardback, like Garfield himself. I was intrigued by the lock and enjoyed that journal very much. I still have it, full of my youthful musings.
I think that same Christmas I received a long-armed stuffed monkey. Its arms were intended to hug someone, with Velcro attached to the ends so it could stay. My big brothers gave the best gifts!
I remember thinking that they had the money to give gifts because they were working paying jobs. I was not; seven years younger than the youngest of my four brothers, I was a babe in arms when the first went out to get a job. This did not make me want a job; it didn’t even make me wish I had the money to give them gifts. I just accepted it, as I accepted lots of things. It was logical and therefore right.
My mother wrapped packs of new underwear and new socks for us to open, along with one or two fun gifts. I was not the most appreciative of new underwear, but that, too, was something I accepted. I did NOT wrap underwear to give my children.
One Christmas my little sister and I received plastic dolls that could pee; that is, you put a bottle of water to their mouths and presently the water would leak out their rears. They came with one or two cloth diapers, and my mother had sewed more flannel diapers in an hourglass shape. We spent some hours feeding the dolls and then hanging their diapers on a laundry rack made of wooden dowels, standing over the floor furnace. It was fun. My children got no such; they either didn’t exist or weren’t the in-thing. My children got little brothers and sisters.
One year when I was old enough to understand some of the logistics of Christmas, my brothers persuaded my parents to let us hang stockings. This had never been done in our family before; my brothers picked out some of their long greyish white tube socks. We had a wood stove, black and sooty; no way were we going to hang stockings anywhere near it. So my mother pinned them to the back couch cushion; they “hung”. In the morning the socks were suitably lumpy, with an orange in each and some wrapped candies. I think that was the only time my parents hung stockings.
