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.

When I was a kid, my mom used to shop at a local natural foods store (which was a lot more granola back in the ‘80s, if I recall). Whenever we went together, she’d let me get a fig bar (or sometimes they were apricot), like a fig newton, only the “cake” part was made from whole wheat that was more like a bran muffin than cake.  As a kid, I grudgingly accepted this sweet offering because I knew it was a fig bar or a big bag of nothing at all.

I recently went back to this store for the first time since I was a kid and as I was cruising the bulk bins for raisins for Lulu, there they were… the fig bars in the square plastic container with the bakery sticker on them: Whole Wheat Fig Bars.  As pricey as the were ($5.29/lb?  Seriously?) I snatched them up and later on that day, busted the container open. Suddenly, I was six years old again.

The smell of the fig bars completely transported me back to my childhood. It was so *weird*, I wasn’t expecting such a tactile memory. And eating that first one was like riding in the rusty metal shopping cart kid’s seat, swinging my legs and grinning at everyone who happened to look in my direction.  I remembered stuff my mom would wear to the store, the color of the scarf on her head, her yellow t-shirt…

I have been struggling lately to remember things about my mom. The actual memories, aged over the last 24 years, get blurred with photographs and other people’s stories and I’ve started forgetting how she moved and sounded.  To be honest, I started forgetting a while ago which I’ve been trying to deny to myself, but it’s started coming up more for me now that I’m around the same age she was when she had me.

So this weird fig bar moment was more than just a snack, it was a revival of something I thought I’d forgotten, a connection to something I thought was lost.  Funny how things sneak up on you when you don’t expect them… like the scale if I don’t stop eating these fig bars.