My favorite Christmas

I remember the year.  I was graduating from college that coming spring and seeing a whole new independent life in front of me.  I wanted one last memory to indelibly engrave on my brain before I left those childish years behind.

I departed a crisp white mountainous range where I went to a university to come home for the holidays.  I didn’t have much money, but a surprise Christmas celebration for my parents, I thought.  That’s what I would do.

I engaged my younger brothers and sister to help me out.  I gathered my family in the small living room.  The small room held the same brown tweed chair my mom had recovered several times using her sewing skills, the aging hide-a-bed sofa where the younger ones loved to hide inside, and the dusty brown colored carpeting that hid the many years of dirt we’d traipsed in leaving the door wide open.  I could still hear my dad hollering, “You born in a barn?”

My eight-year-old brother and seven-year-old sister never complained when I adorned them in old pinned-up bathrobes and towels to portray the Nativity scene as I read the story from Luke.  My twelve-year-old brother was quite the self-taught musician and played his rendition of Silent Night on a toy Casio keyboard.  I don’t think I ever fully appreciated his talent until years later I heard him play his original compositions on the guitar and piano. 

That Christmas eve, we shared hot chocolate and stories.  Each telling their favorite Christmas memory.  “I was probably about nine years old and my oldest sister, Lib, gave me an old pair of glasses she’d found in the woods,” my dad said.  My dad was the youngest child of a tiny round, red-headed, strong-willed, but financially strapped woman, raising six children in an upstate corner of Ohio, a stone’s throw from West Virginia.  “Lib,” he paused a moment and thought before continuing, “she must have been about nineteen, had poked out the lenses.  She taped two silver dollars, one where each glass had been.  I’d never had a silver dollar before.  It was pretty special.”

“I was twelve years old when my mom gave me my very own Singer sewing machine,” said my mom, tears running down her cheeks.  “It was used, but it didn’t matter.  The little Featherweight still sews like a charm.”  My dad grinned.  He knew that under the tree that year, the big wrapped box that he’d secretively tied a Christmas tag with my name on it was really for my mom.  It contained a new Singer sewing machine, able to leap buildings in a single bound.

You know, I don’t remember what my gift was that Christmas.  But it was my favorite.

What was your favorite holiday memory?

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4. The lost wise man
5. Christmases past