Holiday Memories: Rocks But No Coal

The holidays always bring so many memories of my youth, good and bad. The good include Midnight Mass and coming home in the mysterious dark at about 2 a.m., the music on the stereo, and the suspense of what might be under the tree. The games on Christmas and New Year's Days. The decorations. The smell of the fresh tree, selected some evening in December then decorated the Sunday before Christmas. The bad include my oldest sister's tantrums which were a regular staple of the holidays. She was never happy, never content. But I always sought the best of times and concentrated on that, looked for the amusing in any situation. For example, one holiday season, our television broke down between Christmas and New Year's. The good part was that a friend of my next older sister's (the sane one) loaned us a portable and I watched the Rose Bowl parade on that, experiencing a miniature television for the first time. So I have lots of memories, but the one today is about the special boxes under the tree.

I don't know about other families, but our fresh trees always seemed to lean to one side. Daddy would saw off the bottom to make it flat, but the tree always seemed unbalanced. It would be screwed into one of those small red and green stands that held water so the tree wouldn't dry out too quickly. The stands were short and had three legs curving to lie flat on the floor. The trees would always tip over, spilling water and knocking off ornaments (those glass balls made quite a mess of shards).

Mother, also the mother of invention, pondered the problem one year, then got three good-sized boxes, put several rocks into each, then wrapped them in the most beautiful paper and decorated them with lengths of ribbon. These nicely wrapped packages she placed under the tree, one weighting each leg of the tree-stand. Beautiful. When the tree came down, she placed each box into a plastic bag and put them away with the rest of the decorations to use the next year, and the next. In time, when the paper and bows got tattered, she's re-wrap the packages . It was kinda nice, because when the tree went up, there was no waiting for brightly decorated packages to be placed under it. And after Christmas morning, there were always packages to add to the ambiance.

I can't recall what happened when my brother-in-law married into the family, probably the exact same thing that happened in 1976, the first Christmas Dearest Hubby spent at my parents' home. (The first year we were married, we were unable to go.) Christmas morning came. My husband loves Christmas, loves the presents. Really he's a big kid at heart and at his parents' home, he'd go bounce on his sisters' beds to waken them while it was still dark. Poor DH, he was so totally unused to our way of doing things. After waking, we always cooked a big breakfast (eggs, bacon, hash browns, toast, sweet rolls, milk, juice, and coffee in her collection of china cups), then had to wash the dishes. It was 11 before we were ready, then that year, Mother realized she had no film for her camera, so sent Daddy and me out to find some. So it was noon before we finally started. We didn't have a lot of presents, just enough for everyone to open a few. We progressed. We aren't a family to all rip open the gifts all at once. Each gift was distributed, oohed and ahhed over, opened and admired, the paper folded (to save or throw away), ribbons saved or placed on one's head for decoration as we sipped juice, coffee or a stronger libation (it was after noon, after all).

But all good things end and finally, we sighed and started to stand and pick up. DH was surprised! "What are you doing?" he said, "there are still presents under the tree."

"No, they're all gone," someone replied, looking around.

"No, I see them," DH exclaimed. "Right there."

Several of us bent over, looking. "No, I don't see any," several of us said, looking puzzled.

DH looked at us like we were crazy. "There are still gifts!".

"There are no more gifts," I told him, peering into the branches of the tree, seeking a stray gift.

"Right there!" he pointed under the tree,as we all searched.

Finally it hit us and we all started laughing, which annoyed him even more. We knew the boxes of rocks weren't gifts and didn't notice them at all, but he'd been watching these large, well decorated pieces the whole time, wondering what was in them and to whom they were destined.

Ah, the joys of newlyweds learning the holiday ways of the other's family. I am not sure he ever forgave us for the boxes of rocks masquerading a Christmas gifts. I do know that Christmas mornings in our own home was never as leisurely as those of my childhood. And we never had wrapped rocks under the tree.