Every night when I plug in the little light that shines into the Nativity set that my dad bought before I was born, little Christmas memories crawl across my mind like a fast-forwarding movie....
My Uncle Mino and my dad used to put knife marks into the chestnuts before they were heated up in the oven after dinner on Christmas Eve. Uncle Mino would make a cross into his half of the chestnuts, my dad would make an X. You would think, both marks being almost alike in size and design, that either mark would let enough steam escape so the chestnuts wouldn't explode in my grandmother's oven. Every year, however, there would be a discussion between my uncle and my dad as to which mark was the proper one, which mark was the most efficient, which was the most Christmas-worthy. The final decision was never committed to a lasting part of family tradition, but those chestnut discussions are still talked about to this day.
On Christmas Day, my Aunt Edie would proudly show the rest of the family how she decorated the large wishbone from the Thanksgiving turkey that everyone shared the month before. Every Thanksgiving, no matter who carved the turkey, they were instructed by Aunt Edie to not only save the wishbone for her, but to not let the knife scratch or cut into that wishbone. Edie would soak the wishbone in warm soapy water, getting off all the meat residue. By the time she was finished cleaning and polishing up that wishbone, it looked like a fine piece of ivory. When the wishbone reached that exalted state, Edie began to create her masterpiece. First came a coat of clear nail polish. After that dried, she would paint the wishbone with her current favorite color of nail polish. (She swore that Revlon made the best polish, for both nails and wishbones.) After two or three coats of color, Edie would brush on another coat of clear nail polish. She would sprinkle the still-wet wishbone with glitter, tiny glass beads, the tiniest seed pearls, or brightly colored sequins. Aunt Edie had to plan the design before that last coat of clear polish, and she worked fast to decorate one side of the wishbone before it dried, then she'd repeat the process on the other side. The result was a sparkling and embellished turkey wishbone that she would wrap in tissue paper until it was revealed at my grandmother's house on Christmas. We all ooohed and aaahed over her creativity.... and by the time I was in high school, my grandmother had about a dozen painted and blinged-out wishbones displayed in her china cabinet.
The adults in our family had Christmas dinner in the dining room.... the kids ate at the children's table in the kitchen. In the dining room, the 'good' china was used; in the kitchen, the kids used the everyday plates. Our family never had paper plates or plastic utensils, and paper cups weren't even used in the backyard for barbeques. My Uncle Mino would never eat food served on a paper plate, not even when he worked in the city and had lunch at the corner deli or at the cafeteria in his office building. At one particular deli, where Uncle Mino was a good customer, he asked the waitress if he could please have his lunch on a 'real' plate, otherwise he just couldn't eat there. This deli had the most delicious New York-style hot dogs, something that Mino loved to eat during the summer months. He asked the waitress so nicely, and she spoke to her boss, and they provided a restaurant-style china plate for Mino whenever he ate there during his lunch hour. In our family, we all learned early on to appreciate the time it took to make good food, and we also learned that presentation and protocol was just as important as the taste. I think of all of that at Christmas time, because when I use my own collection of Christmas-design plates during the months of November and December, I have to wonder why no one in our family ever thought to use bright and festive Christmas plates at this time of the year, considering how much they all loved Christmas. Maybe our family was just too big to have a third set of dinner plates. And probably, my grandmother was more practical than I am.
My Aunt Dolly was a saver of gift boxes, ribbons, cards, wrapping paper. If it could be re-used, or made into something new and different, then she saved it... and stored these things up in the attic. At best, all her boxes of "save this" and "save that" became a craft cornucopia for all of us kids when we told her we had nothing to do. There was one Christmas that my Uncle Bernie gave my Uncle Mino a new wrist-watch. I don't remember what brand of watch it was, but I do remember that it came in a very nice wooden box. Everyone in the family still remembers that box, because my dad made such a fuss over the box, rather than appreciating the watch. My dad liked pocket watches, so his brother's new wrist-watch didn't interest him... but that wooden box certainly did, and he just couldn't get over the fact that the watch came in such an expensive box. Daddy made such a to-do over that box that Uncle Bernie made sure that Aunt Dolly saved the box..... and the following Christmas, Bernie wrapped up that watch box and gave it to my dad for Christmas. As soon as my dad unwrapped that gift from Bernie, everyone at the table just cracked up laughing.... hardly anyone could even speak because we were all laughing so hard. I remember my father laughing so hard that he cried. To this day, all you have to say to get my family walking down Memory Lane is "Remember that Christmas when Bernie wrapped up the empty watch box...."
In the 1960s, Uncle Mino's girlfriend Kathryn gave Aunt Dolly a beautiful silk garland of green holly and red berries..... it came from a shop in Manhattan, and no one in the family had ever seen anything quite like it. Aunt Dolly hung up the garland on the archway between the living room and the dining room. That particular archway had a wooden, fancy-swirled rod supporting a swag of satin curtains hanging between the two rooms. The silk leaves and the bright red berries of the garland were just the perfect Christmas touch for that space. When the Christmas decorations were taken down in January, that garland was the last bit of Christmas happiness to get packed away. The following year, it was the first decoration to be taken out of its storage box. When Kathryn passed away, the family was just devastated by her sudden and unexpected death. Even though Mino and Kathryn never married, they saw one another every weekend and Kathryn was very much a part of the family. Aunt Dolly was so saddened by Kathryn's death that Christmas came early that year..... that beautiful garland was taken from its box and hung up on the archway months before any of the other Christmas decorations came down from the attic. Kathryn's garland stayed up on that archway for years and years afterwards, never being taken down except for cleaning, and the garland was still there in 2009 when the family home was put up for sale.
When I was a kid, our tree was put up in the dining room, in the corner opposite the piano. The Nativity set that I now display in the living room of our Texas home was always underneath the Christmas tree when I was a kid. My mother would set it up at the center of the tree, on top of the tree-skirt which she would cover with a rolled-out piece of cotton batting. No one ever questioned the 'snow' scene around the manger, until I got older and let everyone know that Christ was born in a desert, not at the North Pole. This Nativity set has a lot of individual pieces...... the family, the wise men, the shepherds, a donkey, a camel, a cow, and a lot of sheep. When I was little, I would take the sheep from the Nativity set and bring them into the living room. I would put the sheep on the sofa and read stories to them, or make believe I was the teacher and the sheep were my students. My mother was constantly having to rescue the sheep and return them to the crèche, telling me that if I wasn't careful with them, their legs would break off and they wouldn't be able to follow the shepherds. Either I was very careful with the sheep years ago, or my mother rescued them just in time, because all of the sheep survived without damage to their legs. When my husband and I first saw this house, I knew that the dining room was not only big enough for the furniture we had, but also large enough for a Christmas tree that would touch the ceiling. Since we've been in this house, the real tree has always had pride-of-place in a corner of the dining room. I have quite a few Christmas trees in all of the other rooms, but the dining room tree gets the vintage bubble lights and the antique ornaments. The Nativity set is on the buffet in the living room, resting on gold-dusted bits of hay instead of a blanket of cotton snow, and I've got the same hay pieces dripping from the roof of the crèche. There are no little children to play with the sheep, and all the animals around the manger look quite content.
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