Tenth Musee

I was talking to Kathy this morning about the upcoming holidays and she commented that she’s looking forward to Christmas a little more this year. We pondered that it’s because Reilly is a bit older this year, she’s got two kids now and that sort of thing.  I asked if they did the traditional “bake cookies for Santa, leave a carrot out for Rudolph” scenario and of course, they do.  It made me think of my own holidays with my family and the memories I have of being really small.

I remember being about 3 or 4, wearing footie pajamas and standing on the precipice to the living room from the hallway, with my hands clasped together in utter delight, marveling at all the stuff that Santa had brought. I don’t recall much of it now — I think there was a drum that I promptly stuck my drumsticks through and I remember there being a cowgirl hat and boots and one of those little horses on wheels.  But what I distinctly remember is seeing the plate of cookies we’d set out the night before, missing 3 or 4 bites, the milk half empty and the carrot nibbled just enough.

We’ll just gloss over the fact that one of my earliest Christmas memories revolves around food.

On Christmas Eve, my mom and I made cookies together, cutting them out with cookie cutters, cooling them on racks and eventually frosting and decorating them just so.  I remember mom helping me pour Santa’s milk in a smoke-colored highball glass and setting everything out on our rattan coffee table.  I remember so clearly my mom leaning in and the way she smelled like sugar cookies and Jergen’s lotion, reminding me that these cookies were for Santa, as a thank you for my Christmas gifts, as a snack on his long journey. And while I really wanted that green-frosted Christmas tree with the little silver balls that later in life cracked one of my molars, I remember looking wide-eyed at her as I tucked my hand away, nodding in agreement.  We wouldn’t want Santa or Rudolph to go hungry.

In hindsight, it seems all the other reindeer were left to fend for themselves.

Dad would read ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas, as Rockwell-esque as that seems. It didn’t last forever, perhaps on the first handful of Christmases and a few scattered over the years after that, but I fondly recall him wearing a very red v-neck sweater with a wide-collared shirt underneath, sitting with his leg crossed in a big 70′s velour chair, reading from a thin hard-cover picturebook with little tears in the sleeve.  And when it was over, he’d scoop up my little PJ’d self and tuck me in, allowing sugarplums to dance accordingly, while mom was in the kitchen, pouring the grown-ups some Benedictine in snifters.

Of course, eventually I realized that Dad also enjoyed green-frosted Christmas tree cookies with little silver balls on them and that Rudolph was really my mom, but there’s something distinctly tactile and emotional about that memory of seeing the cookies on Christmas morning, half eaten, milk glass half empty.  I truly believed that Santa had been there, that he’d brought all these wonderful goodies for me, because I was such a good girl.  It was a time that I never questioned anything about myself or my self-worth, about faith or politics or reality.  It encompasses all the wonder I think Christmas should be for little children… pure and wonderous and magical. It makes me happy for Reilly and Carter, that they’ll get a chance to experience that.

It would nice if the holidays could still be like that for everyone.

My whole life, I’ve considered myself an only child. Even when I had step-siblings — especially when I had step-siblings — I considered myself the one and only, my parents’ sole offspring.  And that part is true — I am their only child.  But at 15 years old, I was told that my dad — the last of the famous international playboys, apparently — had other children before he married my mom.  My mother knew, but they kept it a secret from me in fear I would spill the beans to my well-to-do maternal grandparents, who didn’t know — understandably.  She passed away with that secret kept.

There’s more to this story, but none of which I feel is the business of the Internet.  Maybe a book someday (man, it would make a good semi-fictionalized memoir), but not the Internet… not yet, perhaps not ever.

read more >