Have we forgotten to remember the magic that is Christmas?
- Melissa Herrera: Not Waiting for Friday
- December 25, 2017
- 1506
We had Christmas cards once that showed a girl of seven or eight, clad in pajamas, sitting in front of the fireplace. I used to stare at that little girl and think she was me. Her head was shaped like mine with the same length of hair, and she too sat in front of the fireplace looking up the chimney, just like me. The mantle was decorated with pine and candles, our handmade stockings hanging on a nail, and I would gently touch them, hoping to decipher what awaited me inside.
The wonder of the season was never lost on me, and I would lie awake in my room, bed placed under the alcove with the pink and white quilt grandma had made me, and strain my ears for reindeer hooves on the rooftop. I knew Santa and the reindeer weren’t real, but what was the harm in pretending?
My clock radio sat beside my bed, and as I tried to squeeze my eyes shut, willing myself to sleep, the disc jockeys would report sightings of Santa whisking through the sky. If I close my eyes, I can feel the magic that coursed through me, the ever-hopeful feeling of childhood and its wonder.
Mom had a small wooden cabinet that held extracts of mint and maple, dripped and dropped into candies and caramels and stained glass hard candies that filled tins and glass bowls. I would watch as she boiled sugar. It danced in undulating splendor as the temperature would rise, and I’d watch it go up, up and up on the glass thermometer that hung from the side of the double boiler. Soft crack, crack, hard crack, so many mysterious words that would later imprint on my brain when my time came to make them.
The caramel would spread out on the counter, and when cool, we’d cut them into pieces and wrap them up. There was a tin that held the caramels, wrapped individually in wax paper, and they would melt on my tongue and disappear in a succulent river of sugar.
Our big shindig was always on Christmas Eve with a gift exchange and vast expanse of delicious appetizers spread across the kitchen. Plates were filled with fat shrimp and homemade sauce, heavy on the horseradish because that’s how Dad made and liked it.
Bacon-wrapped dates piled high in a beautiful dish and a ham sugared and sliced for sandwiches. There were chocolate-dipped peanut butter Ritz crackers, Buckeyes and sugar cookies, so many sugar cookies. A favorite was the chocolate toffee crack, whose layers would crunch, then dissolve magically.
We always had enough for Christmas: stockings full of tiny treasures, always a new diary and calendar, sometimes a pair of coveted jeans, and books, always books. It was a comforting Christmas morning filled with cinnamon rolls and cocoa and sticky sweet sliced oranges. We would later shove the rinds in our mouth and smile a big orange smile, faces made across the table at each other.
I don’t remember having any big family meals on Christmas day, and we would laze away the hours watching TV or reading the new books we’d received. I am thankful for the Christmases I had.
The town of Berlin was hushed on this day. Hardly a car would be driving by outside, except to go to the home of a relative. It felt peaceful and calm as any small-town Christmas feels, like when you’re safely in its bubble. As I ventured out and discovered that Christmas did indeed exist outside my world, I learned new ways of celebrating and making different traditions.
My own children were born and had a version of my childhood Christmas along with my husband’s traditions, and that blended and blurred the lines on what I once thought was the only way to celebrate.
Traditions are fuzzy and warm, a good and palpable way of keeping alive what once was. You dissemble and rebuild as you grow and begin a family of your own, keeping some components and bright spots and bringing new ones into the mix.
Diverse traditions endear themselves to you, just like the caramel that was boiled and swirled into a cohesive final element but with maybe a new flavor swirled inside of it. And when you bite into it, it’s just as sweet as you remembered.
The wonder of Christmas can remain if we work hard to remember it. Because inside that magic is where the true spirit of the season dwells. It’s in us.