My mom made Christmas magical. Still does. And my dad has always given her all the credit — picking and decorating the perfect tree, buying, hiding, then wrapping all our gifts, always in two different kinds of wrapping paper to distinguish mine from my brother, Kevin’s.
Santa would always tell us in the note he left next to the empty plate of cookies we’d put out for him whose gifts were in the “Santa” paper and whose were in the “Snowman” paper.
Dad always installed the tree in its stand and strung the lights, happy to let Mom, Kevin and me paw through the boxes of glass balls, homemade decorations and the brass angel ornaments that had our names and birth year engraved on them. Dad also strung the outdoor lights — though not happily. (He’s not a fan of heights or ladders.)
And it was always Dad’s job to go downstairs first on Christmas morning “to make sure Santa had come” (and to start the coffee and get the camera ready).
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Christmas used to start around Halloween, when the Sears Christmas catalog, the “Wish Book” would arrive in the mail, its glossy pages showing my brother and me everything we didn’t know we wanted, but suddenly couldn’t live without. The toy section was always in the same place, easy to find, right behind those white order-form pages in the middle of the book, where catalog shoppers wrote down the item numbers, sizes and colors of the products they were ordering.
Kevin and I would pore over the catalog, each armed with a pen to circle the items we wanted for Christmas and mark them with an M or a K (lest mom think that I had wanted a Millennium Falcon and Kevin wanted a stroller for his baby dolls.)
“By the time you two finished with that catalog, everything in the toy section was circled,” my mom recalled the other night.
But we still had more than a month until Christmas, and Mom’s no dummy. She’d leave the catalog lying around for a week or two. Kevin and I would thumb through it a few more times to be sure we hadn’t missed something crucial.
But by late November, when it was time to draft our official Christmas lists for Santa, the catalog was nowhere to be found.
“You had to write your lists without consulting the catalog, so Santa would know what you wanted most,” Mom said.
Her strategy worked flawlessly — most of the time.
All bets were off when Cabbage Patch Kids hit the market in 1982. I was 6.
“You, Mindy and Jenny didn’t decide you wanted them until about four days before Christmas,” my mom said, referring to my best friend, Mindy. Yep, Mindy and Mandy, best friends, and we were freakin’ adorable, and our friend Jenny Staley, who lived down the street. “So the three moms all went in three different directions and looked everywhere for those dolls that were sold out everywhere.
“Thank God, John Staley (Jenny’s dad) was a Braniff pilot who had a flight to London,” she said. “He ended up picking up three of the dolls over there for you girls.”
I hadn’t known until the other night — 42 years later — that my Cabbage Patch Kid, Tyler Bo, was imported from England.
I also hadn’t known that my mom used to hide our Christmas gifts in the trunk of her car, or that my dad was still a bit traumatized by the “some-assembly-required” nature of my toy kitchen set.
“Oh my God, that thing was a nightmare,” he said the other night as my mom agreed, laughing.
“It was all made of thin metal with sharp edges, tab A, slot B,” my dad said, joining the phone call.
“There were sharp corners, small pieces, so many choking hazards,” my mom said.
“There’s no way that thing would pass safety inspections today. But no one knew any better back then. You survived. Kids survived back then. And you loved that kitchen set.”
I did love it. I still remember the fake rubber hamburgers, sandwiches and fried eggs that I would “cook” and serve.
In fact, I’ve loved every Christmas. Every year.
Countdowns were conducted on construction paper chains and Advent calendars with little windows to open each morning for four weeks. There was a Christmas concert at school, carols on the radio, packages arriving in the mail from aunts, uncles and grandparents. The boxes of decorations marked “Christmas” came up from the basement and revealed the treasures we had forgotten since last year — the snow-flecked candles, the nativity scene, the cheap plastic
Santa and sleigh that my mom had been trying to toss forever, but that Kevin and I adored. (She still hasn’t gotten rid of it.)
Our names were written in glitter on our stockings. Christmas cookies sat on trays on the dining room table and a snow-flecked wreath was on our front door. Dad always read “’Twas the Night Before Christmas” right before bed on Christmas Eve, when sleep seemed nearly impossible. And then there was the cardinal rule that we were NOT to wake mom and dad until 7 a.m.
We hadn’t known they’d been up till 4, assembling my kitchen set, dollhouse or Kevin’s Millennium Falcon. But by the time we opened them on Christmas morning, they looked just as good as they did in the Sears Wish Book — even if Mom and Dad looked a little tired.
