Christmastime is here

I was just at Christmas Eve services at my church.  I go to a fairly large church and we have 7 services!  There are 3 family related services, 3 candlelighting services and a communion service, which is the one I attend.  It’s become a tradition for me every year to go.  It’s held in the larger of the two chapels at the church and it’s both relaxed and a little austere.  And it’s the one service on Christmas Eve that has communion.  It’s a noon service, so timing wise it works well.  I think I also like the fact that it's simple and not flashy.

While I was there today, one of the hymns we sang was “The First Noel” and it immediately took me back to my childhood and a memory so clear it actually brought tears to my eyes.

My childhood church was Covenant Presbyterian Church in Charlotte, NC.  Rather unassuming on the outside, the sanctuary to me was magical and awesome and awe-inspiring.  To me it always seemed huge and magnificent and I felt wrapped up in a happy blanket.  We were told that the church was fashioned after an upside down ark, so it had a pointed ceiling that was all dark wood and beams.  The pews were also dark wood with deep purple velvet cushions.  The stained glass windows were “real” stained glass, all jewel tones, and told Bible stories.  While it seemed cavernous and huge, it also seemed enveloping and warm.  There was a great pipe organ, played by a magnificent organist.  My favorite time of year was at Christmas, because we had this wonderful Christmas service and all the choirs sang.  When I was very small, we weren’t allowed to participate in the processional or carry real candles, so it was a huge treat to be old enough to walk down the central aisle with the lights dimmed and carrying real candles.  I remember wearing a choir robe that was black on the bottom and white on top with huge billowy sleeves.  We had to learn the first two verses of “The First Noel” because, with candles in our hands, we couldn’t carry a hymnal.  I was so proud to be floating down the aisle singing one of my favorite Christmas hymns!

I went to one candlelighting service at my current church, but the times always conflict with dinners and no one really seems to want to go with me, so I've only been the one time.  I remember the time I went it brought back some of those same memories.  I remembered having to breathe deeply to keep the tears from flowing.

But Christmas doesn’t mean the same thing anymore to me.  The first Christmas I was married turned out to be my father’s last Christmas.  I didn’t know that at the time, but he’d had cancer and it had come back and maybe I should have been more in tune with that.  But my new in-laws were in town from Jacksonville and I got talked into spending most of the holidays with them.  We ended up spending about an hour and a half with my family on Christmas Day.  There was no Christmas Eve dinner with them and we came well after the gift opening and breakfast traditions on Christmas morning.  My father died a little more than a month later and Christmas was never the same again.  I promised myself I wouldn’t miss those traditions anymore, and I didn’t, but the magic was gone.

And then 9 years ago, we buried my mother on Christmas Eve.  It seemed cruel that there was so much happiness and festivity going on around us during those few days when I felt none of it.  I know what Mother would say to me now – “just tell yourself you’re not going to let it get to you”.  But it does.

I don’t know that I could say today what would bring me joy at Christmas.  I spent Christmas one year in France and that was certainly magical, but I still went to bed Christmas Eve and cried for what was missing.  As I was driving home from church today, I thought how nice it would be to be surrounded by a family with a fire going and laughter all around.  Or rushing around with someone I loved grabbing last minute gifts and then having lunch and a few drinks at a local pub.  But I’m not really sure if having those things would make it feel ok.

I am happy to be able to spend time with my brothers and their families.  If someone is missing, as George will be this year because he’s sick, it feels incomplete.  But it feels incomplete anyway because the two people that made Christmas joyful and magical aren’t here.  There will always be something missing for me and always be a hole I can’t fill.

But, as I do every year, I try.  I do the modern equivalent of “just tell yourself it’ll be ok” – “fake it till you make it”.  And I will be happy to spend time with the people that I love most in the world, even though there’s still an ache in my heart.

Traditions!

Traditions!  Every time I think about this word, I’m hearing the song from “Fiddler on the Roof”.  I actually saw that on Broadway.  When I lived in New Jersey during junior high school, I had the opportunity to see 3 Broadway plays – “Fiddler on the Roof”, “Mame”, and “Man of La Mancha”.  How exciting was that?

Anyway, this is the time of year for traditions.  My family has always been about traditions, not just at the holidays, but all year long.  But I see a lot of those traditions going by the wayside, which makes me a little sad.  I wrote about the naming traditions in my family.  But how we celebrated – whether it was Christmas or Thanksgiving or birthdays – was just as important.

Birthdays were always your “special” day.  You always got to pick out your special dinner, as well as what cake and ice cream you wanted.  I always picked shrimp as my dinner.  Since my birthday is in August, there were a number of times when I was fortunate enough to be vacationing at the beach on my birthday and we would pick up shrimp fresh from the shrimp boats for my birthday dinner.  My choice of cake was always chocolate cake with chocolate icing.  I didn’t need or want anything fancy, just plain chocolate.  Oh, and chocolate ice cream too.  Plain.  For my 16^th birthday I did get a bakery cake, but I’m pretty sure I had chocolate ice cream to go with it.  I don’t remember all of my brothers’ birthday meals, but I do remember that my brother John’s was fried chicken.  At some point, Mother decided that she didn’t want to fry chicken anymore and she told John that if he wanted that, she could pick some up from Kentucky Fried Chicken.  He was horrified.  He tried to shame her into making an exception for him, but she was not going to be budged.  I don’t think he ever had fried chicken again on his birthday!  When we were young, my grandmother often made our cakes.  Anything we wanted she would try to create.  A favorite was her angel food cake.  My mother tried making it one year when we lived in New Jersey and Mocha wasn’t there to make the cake.  Her first attempt completely vanished in the pan!  So she tried again.  Looked good, but when we went to eat it, it was the chewiest thing ever – turns out she had mistakenly doubled the number of egg whites!  That was another thing she never made again.

As the years went by and we got older, we stopped having the special birthday meal.  Even the cakes stopped being our “special” cakes.  These days, if there is a birthday celebration at all (and there isn’t always), the cake is likely to be an ice cream cake or something from Publix.  And the ice cream is whatever someone picks up.  We no longer seem to celebrate everyone’s birthday together either.

Every time there was a “holiday” – like Memorial Day or 4^th of July or Labor Day – we would go over to the house and cook out.  Even after my father died, Mother liked to have everyone over and we would cook out hamburgers.  I think she just liked to see us and it gave her an excuse to do that.  We don’t do that anymore either.

New Year’s Day also had a tradition to it.  We always got together and had the traditional ham, black eyed peas, and greens.  Mother would nearly lose her mind if we didn’t do that.  She was convinced that we would jinx ourselves if we did not follow that tradition.  But I can’t tell you the last time I had that meal on New Year’s Day.  Not that I would eat greens these days – yuck! – but I don’t eat anything even close to that.

But the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays were the big deal.  We always had pretty much the exact same meal for both holidays – turkey, dressing, cranberry sauce, squash casserole, peas, rice, rolls, a relish tray, and pumpkin and mincemeat pies for dessert.  Growing up, we used to have these big meals at my Great Aunt Helen’s house.  She always had a huge tray of shrimp and cocktail sauce, which I remember fondly.  All of the children would gather around the coffee table and nosh on the shrimp, while our dismayed parents stood behind us cursing themselves for teaching us to like shrimp.  We had other dishes on the menu that I remember,  like sweet potato casserole and pickled peaches.  In the years before my mother died, she actually was ok with having HoneyBaked ham and HoneyBaked sides for Thanksgiving.  I do remember one year my brother Paul made a pumpkin pie for dessert using a graham cracker crust.  Which he baked first.  That was interesting.

The first year after my father died, I had Thanksgiving at my house.  I thought that my mother would appreciate it, since especially that first year all the traditions made her sad.  I did my best to recreate the traditional meal and even found a sweet potato casserole recipe, which I had to make for several years in a row after that. 

After my mother died, Thanksgiving became kind of a lost holiday.  My brothers John and Paul went off elsewhere with their families and my brother George and I were left to our own devices.  For several years we went to one of the Brazilian churrascarias for Thanksgiving.  Other years we got ham slices and sides.  It meant few or no leftovers, but it actually wasn’t so bad.

Christmas is where we’ve held on to most of the traditions, although not all.  Our tradition was always to have Christmas Eve dinner with all the trimmings and then eat leftovers on Christmas Day.  We still do that, although not all of us together anymore.  My sister-in-law Beth usually prepares the Christmas Eve dinner and she has done traditional as well as non-traditional (a shrimp boil).  The years that they lived in France meant that George and I again had to be creative.  Christmas Eve dinner at a restaurant is ok, but actually was more sad to me than Thanksgiving.

When we were growing up, Santa always left our presents in the living room, with each of us having our own “station” of gifts.  Once we had had our fill of investigating them, we would open presents under the tree, and then we would have breakfast.  Our traditional breakfast was scrambled eggs, sausage links, and Moravian sugar cake from Dewey’s Bakery in Winston-Salem.  My mother always drove to Charlotte before Christmas to deliver gifts to her side of the family and always returned home with the Christmas sugar cakes.  As we got older and were finally able to convince my mother that we no longer believed in Santa Claus, her plan was that all the Santa gifts – yes, we still got them, even into our 20’s and 30’s – would be wrapped and go under the tree.  Daddy would wrap the gifts and number them; on Christmas morning, he would have his number key so that each of us got the right gifts.  Then the opening ceremonies would begin – we went around the room, each opening a gift, until they were all opened – and then we had breakfast.  After Daddy died, Mother still wrapped the presents, but she put names on them instead of numbers.

We still have that same breakfast, with some additions.  But one thing has never changed – the sugar cake!  We still order that from Dewey’s every year.

Another tradition during the Christmas season was driving around looking at the Christmas lights.  I still like doing that.  Not that it’s exclusive to New Jersey, but we seemed to see more than the usual number of houses with an overabundance of Christmas lights in New Jersey.  You know the houses, the ones that had the entire house outlined in lights, along with the yard and the walkways and the shrubs and the trees.  And there were often Santa’s and manger scenes and snowmen and stars on the roofs and chimneys and in the yards.  And more often than not the lights were blinking.  After we moved back from New Jersey, we still drove around looking for the “New Jersey houses”.

So often when I think back on these traditions, I realize that they came from my mother.  I don’t know if they were all the traditions that she grew up with – I’m guessing many of them were, because she was very traditional like that – but I think these were the things she wanted to do to put a stamp on the Moore family experiences.  This is the time of year when I remember my parents and miss them the most.  This is the time of year when the traditions were strongest and the things I remember about those days always revolves around them.  So Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, Seasons’ Greetings and thanks, Mother and Daddy, for making the holidays – all of them – special times.