Celebrating Christmas

For some reason, memories of Christmas seem particularly clear and unusually plentiful. I can’t remember what I ate for breakfast, but I can tell you what I got for Christmas when I was 11: a World Book encyclopedia in twenty four volumes. I had wanted a set of swim fins, a mask and snorkel and a rubber band powered spear gun. Okay, I knew my parents wouldn’t get me the spear gun, but an encyclopedia? What a let down. That’s the other thing about Christmas: our memories of the holiday cover such a wide range of feeling. Joy and sadness, elation and disappointment, togetherness and loneliness, Christmas has a way of heightening every emotion and magnifying every perception.
I missed Christmas entirely when I was eight, brought low by a bout with some bug that rendered me comatose from Christmas Eve Day until Boxing Day. Actually, my mother might have knocked me out with one of her Scottish Highland medications designed to stop coughing, clear sinuses and aid sleep, and which as an adult, I began to suspect contained some quantity of whiskey. At any rate, I missed everything: the playing with my cousins, my Uncle Pete’s fabulous animated outdoor Christmas displays, my grandfather’s sweet smelling Swedish “glüg” distilling slowly on the kitchen stove, and the laughter. Everyone’s laughter. It wasn’t that my own family didn’t laugh, but it was different at Christmas. The petty concerns of being a kid were momentarily forgotten. You didn’t have to worry if your parents were still mad at you for breaking your glasses – again, or be jealous of your older brother’s 26 inch bicycle, or plot how you were going to catch your younger brother stealing from your piggy bank. You could just be happy and laugh. When I was eight, I missed all that laughter: the tittering of the other kids at silly knock-knock jokes and comic books, my grandmother’s warm, quiet chuckle, the sudden grinning outburst from my father, my Aunt Betty’s ironic comments muttered out of the side of her mouth, and most of all, the laughter that welled up and resounded from my Uncle Ray. Uncle Ray wasn’t a big man, but he had a deep, warm laugh that filled the room and enveloped everyone in it. The laughter that came from him was slow and rich and conveyed a sense of pleasant well-being that I don’t believe I have experienced since. I loved to hear Uncle Ray laugh.
We opened our presents with my cousins at their house on Christmas Eve, in the Swedish tradition, the tradition of my father’s family. After a few years, a clever child could predict what the presents would probably be: clothes mostly. A sweater from my grandparents, a shirt from each of my aunts, practical things, with a box of chocolates thrown in for fun. The main presents from Santa, the bikes or trains (or encyclopedias) would be delivered the next morning at home. I welcomed the clothes though, mainly because my other relatives had different taste than my mother and I could expect to receive something that had a little flair, a little chic, a little colour, and that didn’t always itch. Like the paisley shirt my Aunt Betty once bought for me, or the cowboy belt with imitation silver buckle and end tip that my Grandmother gave me. My grandmother’s sense of humour carried over into her gifts. When I was in my early teens she began a tradition of bringing a box of neckties to the Christmas Eve celebrations to be given away to all the men. The ties came from the closet of a wealthy friend who had passed away without any heirs, leaving a multitude of clothing items behind. The eight males in the family would draw numbers that determined the order of tie selection and then pick their favorites until all the ties were gone. Then we would offer a Christmas toast to the late Mr. Forsinger. For years the most valuable clothing items I owned were a half dozen of those Italian silk neckties; I still have one.
The memories of Christmas that Canadians have differ significantly one from another; our families are so very different. Our traditions are wonderfully varied as well, garnered from the many lands and cultures around the world where the Christmas story is celebrated. They shift and refocus over time, as families change and grow and new memories are added.
My Uncle Ray died last week. He was 89. I hadn’t seen him in 10 years, or more than four times in the last 40. Circumstances and geography got in the way. But as I celebrate Christmas this year with my own children and grandchildren I will think of him and my other relatives who are no longer with us. Those memories will make the holiday even richer. And at some point, in the midst of the celebration, above the sound of children and Christmas music, I know that I will smile to hear in the background a certain familiar, deep, resonant laugh. I always do. I always will.