Boxing Day

I have a hard time with holidays now. I miss the folks too much, having declared I would never spend Christmas anywhere but with them, one of my protective barriers against marriage (never found an orphan I was fond of). Key among the adjectives I would use for Mom is ebullient, a $5 word, "having or showing liveliness and enthusiasm," as forever exasperated, a 25-cent word, works for me. Christmas was her family-first absolutely favorite holiday, which automatically meant a manic dreamy enchantment for me, however much I knew I would never really get the toys I wanted such as a Lionel train or a Schwinn bike. I could dream, and I loved the season anyway, transformed by her magic ebullience.
So I write today from having stopped at the cemetery with some flowers on Christmas Eve afternoon on the way to my older sister's for a few hours with her family and my younger sister's family and then retreating because I've been too stupid not to have my own children and Christmas really is for children. My sisters try to maintain "tradition," about as ragged now as some of the sheet music I inherited, and I discourage it, not only because their children aren't really interested in the dead they didn't know or barely knew but because having oyster stew, when only my brother-in-law and I will eat it, is expensive silliness, and I'm sure my nephews and nieces would just as soon eat pizza. Nor do children now participate as we joyfully did, again the store-bought preference to the homemade.
We couldn't go to Grandma and Grandpa's until after my Sunday school's Christmas Eve program, annoying but mandated by our steel-corseted superintendent, a tiny lady with a lovely name, Rose, Grandma Clark, who declared that, e.g.--a space-saving Latin abbreviation for "for example"--anyone who danced past Saturday midnight was going to hell, which dictum may still be the law in next-door Creighton but never fazed us. Well, digressing, I did worry and ask Mom about it because midnight was a half-hour intermission time, then back for another hour--or more--of dancing, if people threw enough money into a passed hat to persuade the band, now fairly drunk, to keep playing.
Anyway, after the church program we took Grandpa L. down to Dad's favorite sister having her family gathering, a remarkably energetic longtime widow who reared--you raise crops, you rear children, another schoolteacher reprimand--her four pretty daughters and livestock, especially horses, alone. Back on the road then to the Bloomfield farm, bouncing on the back seat with the presents. This was one of the few occasions Dad went along, extra special, but then, as mentioned, Grandma was his matchmaker in marrying Mom. He owed her a few showups. If we were really lucky, it was a white Christmas, not the brown Christmas my nephew groused about this past Friday, as anyone does above the Sun Belt. "White Christmas" (Berlin, 1942) and "I'll Be Home for Christmas" (1943), both huge Bing Crosby hits, the latter requested by the returning Gemini 7 astronauts, were new sheet music in the piano bench, and Mama knew all the words. Also, we all dressed up back then for such special occasions, none of the jeans-and-sweatshirt casual slobbiness such as I wore frigid Friday.
The tree was a small balsam from town, Up West sometimes what's now called an eastern red cedar, not really a cedar but a juniper, curiously turned into a pasture tree weed that's making the Knox County hills blackish green as it spreads. The tree was in the living room with few glittery ornaments because my cousins and I were happily privileged to provide the main decorations, colored construction-paper chains carefully cut out and linked with white paste as at school, threaded strings of popcorn and cranberries to be post-holiday bird banquets. No electricity meant that briefly, very briefly, given the potential fire hazard, the twisted red candles in tin clamp holders were lit for our open-mouthed delight. "Just a little longer, Grandma?"
The oyster stew preceded present-opening and the evening-long buffet set out on the dining room table, but we generally stuffed our mouths with the penuche, divinity, and fudge Grandma always made in quantity, along with some assorted store candies now found only at places like The Vermont Country Store catalog and assorted nuts like walnuts, peach-pit-like almonds, and Brazil nuts, which we called "nigger toes," the racist name for the odd slipper shape, in a turned wooden bowl we discovered after his death Dad had squirreled away in the garage; and so I have that handmade bowl, with its center column the holder for the nutcracker and nut picks. Cheap, hence more plentiful, peanuts were in a separate bowl, all nuts in the shell, of course. The sugar high must've added immeasurably to our barely contained anticipation. The only sugary fudge Grandma made--I really should use "Grama" the way the comic strip Pickles does--I wouldn't touch was with the bitter black walnuts, favored by Mom, from the trees around the Bloomfield farmhouse, those being definitely an acquired taste.
Opening presents--somehow we all received gifts from everyone before economically drawing names years later--was the evening's explosive highlight, but we also had music, Grandma playing, Mom leading singing, and, if we were really lucky, Grandpa's playing his fiddle in lively music such as at the Old Fiddlers meets and competitions still held in this area. I can't recall what because he didn't often get out his violin case, actually seemed bashful about it, but his music was like jigs and reels, whirling bright tunes around our heads. I passed along his fiddle to cousin L., who had it refurbished for her niece and nephew, R's children. I hope someone plays it just to honor Grandpa, for I never got beyond the piano and the trombone.
Sometime during the evening a special bottle of liquor was passed around for the men, not Dad, of course, and the women would giggle and taste, and sometimes we children were allowed tiny sips, interesting mainly because it was daring, being otherwise sternly forbidden (should've been apple brandy for Christmas Eve--but wasn't).
By the time they lived Up West on the Peters homestead, I had a different Sunday school superintendent with more program elasticity so we could make the trip in time to be there for Christmas Eve. Up West we all stayed for the few celebratory days. From the Bloomfield farm we went home very late, sated with cheer, to return for Christmas Day's huge meal to stuff ourselves with food and family. What joy! No need then for TV. Truly Merry Christmas.