Vintage christmas memories12/14/2023 For many people, Christmas is simply about spending time with loved ones, getting cozy and enjoying a delicious feast together, and exchanging gifts to show how much we love and care about one another. Though the holiday has religious origins, centering around the birth of Jesus Christ, it’s now celebrated by billions of people worldwide, many of whom do not actually practice Christianity. At least they weren’t breakable.Christmas has been celebrated for thousands of years, so it only makes sense for the way in which it is celebrated to have transformed greatly over time. Heaven forbid you should be decorating a tree with someone who did not share your approach. When it came to icicles, there were two schools of decorating: you were either a thrower or a draper. Richards’ first grade class just last week. If I took one of those ornaments out of the box today it would shed glitter like I’d made it in Mrs. Many involved large amounts of glitter which transferred itself to everything within a six-foot radius. Over the years there were a series of ornaments made by my elementary school self, each featuring a school picture or handprint or something clever my long-suffering teachers managed to get each child in the class to create. Ever try to hang something on a river bottom cedar tree without snagging it? I think at some point in my youthful tree-decorating career, I refused to handle those balls because the potential for snagging the smooth silken threads outweighed any grandeur they might add to the tree. These weren’t breakable but they were something worse - snagable. There were large round satin balls made of what must have been spider silk. I thought the birds should sit on the tree branches but apparently this was not acceptable and the birds went elsewhere, usually where I couldn’t get my hands on them. There was also a pair of china birds that were only trotted out at Christmas although for the life of me I never understood why. When you’re three years old and want to help, it seems like the entire world is breakable. Those Shiny Brite ornaments carefully nestled among their cardboard dividers are indelibly stamped on my memory as my first experience with things that were breakable. I can still hear the creak of the old floor boards and smell the dust as my mom uncovered the big cardboard box that held the lights and ornaments. Going up to the attic to get the decorations meant Christmas was only single-digit days away. That was back in the day before cool-touch LED light bulbs and while those 1960-era decorative lights were pretty to look at, they did get hot. In retrospect, it was no doubt due to my parents’ refusal to put up the tree more than a week before Christmas and their insistence it be escorted out of the house before New Year’s Eve that ensured I survived childhood without the house burning down. Worrying that the tree would fall over ranked only second to worrying it would burn the house down. There was usually a bit of a rodeo when it came to getting it in the tree stand. Some years it looked more like a Christmas bush than a Christmas tree but it always smelled wonderful. My parents made it clear if you put up a real tree in November you would burn the house down.Ībout a week before Christmas, we trekked into the Iowa River bottoms and cut a little cedar tree. I thought that was the coolest thing ever, but we always cut a real one. I had friends whose families put up their artificial trees right after Thanksgiving. That’s when we started talking about putting up the tree. We had some family birthdays in November, too, and those got celebrated without anyone waving tinsel around or lining up to go shopping for doorbusters at 4 a.m.Ĭhristmas showed up about mid-December at our house. Then we had Thanksgiving and that was that. When I was a kid (back in the last century), Christmas didn’t start the day after Halloween.
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