On this Christmas Eve, as I wish the rain trickling down the windows to turn into snow, I give pause to some thoughts and think about an essay I wrote in 1992 for an English Composition class I was taking at the time. I would like to share it with you…

The Faces of Christmas

It has been said that you can never return home once you have left, nor can you return to the Christmas of your youth. Pick any year in the sixties or early seventies and I can tell you how Christmas in my family was celebrated – the year didn’t matter, it was always the same magical holiday.

I have become an adult since those days and Christmas is different, even mixed with sadness and a sense of loss.

As a child, Christmas was marked with the change in seasons when the weather became cold and snow transformed all the yards on my block into a world class sledding chute that extended from the top of the hill at the corner of our house to two blocks down the street.

Today, as the snow piles up outside, I am concerned with having to clear the drive and walkway for fear that someone might otherwise slip and file suit.

By the first Sunday of December of years past our house would begin a transformation. Advent calendars and candles would appear that first week, and more items would follow as the days shortened toward Christmas. The final evidence being the Christmas tree appearing somewhere in the last week when my mother finally convinced my father that it had to be gotten.

This year, the same artifacts seem to appear at about the same rate, but it is I who spent two days looking for the right box (that never seems to get labeled properly), digging the stuff out and finding the appropriate place for it to be displayed. And those cursed Christmas lights! No matter how long I worked the year before making sure each string worked, nor how carefully I pack them away, it never fails that I am in for an afternoon of swapping those tiny bulbs hundreds of times before all the lights work.

Times past, I would spend hours going through catalog after catalog dog-earing pages and assigning priorities to all the toys I wanted for Christmas. All the while happily counting my booty long before it would be a reality (we children learned how to pick things on our want lists in such a way that we guarantee near perfect success).

"Now!" That is the word I keep telling myself is when I should be making my shopping list, checking my budget, and order those things I’ll never find on Christmas Eve (which is when I went shopping for ninety-nine percent of my presents last year). Now is when I should be calling my sister Janet and ask her what she thinks would be a good gift for my mother and other sister, and then do the same with the remaining siblings. Instead I rest on my laurels, I actually got a Christmas present back in September!

The two weeks before Christmas we children could hardly contain ourselves because the pace was quickening toward that day. We had school assemblies, church youth group caroling and the firewood drive, and the inevitable anxiousness about Christmas hurrying up and getting here.

As a parent, I find myself worrying whether I can arrange time to see my two older kid’s school assembly and then make it to Rebecca’s preschool event on time that day. No one seems to go caroling anymore and the firewood drive seems to have vanished somewhere during the years I was away.

"OK, time for everyone to go to the bathroom, we’re leaving. NOW!", my father would always say before we piled into the car for the trip to my Grandparent’s house for Christmas. We always went up on Christmas Eve and would stay overnight.

Something about grandparents’ houses at Christmas was almost magical. There was always the homegrown Christmas tree with the same ornaments and lights and candy canes bedecked about it. The Marzipan and Springerlee treats, chocolates and hot cider. The inevitable "My how you have grown" followed by the pinched cheek from Grandma. The adult-like respect and handshake we always got from Grandpa before we would run in, sometimes remembering to take off our boots, to see the Christmas tree and then look out the windows to see where grandpa cut that year’s tree from.

Then the cousins would soon arrive in hordes after their required attendance at Christmas Mass, (I have thirty some odd cousins on that side of the family). We would gather in Grandpa’s living room and sing carols (including that "awful" commercial jingle my mother hates). My Grandfather would read from the Gospel of Luke, Chapter 2. Finally, the presents would start flying, small children would get buried in wrapping paper, twenty some odd cameras would flash throughout the evening dutifully recording the event and when all presents and thank-yous were distributed we would descend on the kitchen to eat all the treats everyone brought.

Eventually the wrapping paper was cleared of small children and presents, the treats were gone or put away and people began shuffling toward the door or bedrooms to get enough sleep for the huge feast that would take place the next day. Always a very traditional Christmas Dinner.

Since those days my Grandfather announced one year that the reading from Luke was a nice story but he didn’t believe it and would no longer read the passage. My grandparents are now in their eighties and it has been decreed that relatives would no longer sleep over. The Christmas day feast was relegated to the annals of memory, as it was too much bother.

Camera flashes are now painful to my grandparents and have been banished, and one year my mother decreed that Rudolf and his red nose would no longer be honored on Christmas eve as long as she played the piano.

Since the days of my childhood my parents were divorced, and seven years ago, on December 20^th,1985, my father died of cancer – we didn’t even know that he was that sick. I have grown, married, and fathered three children of my own. I have been divorced for over four years now.

Another whole generation has been brought into existence in my family. As we go this year to my grandparent’s house on Christmas eve I know that I will be remembering the days of my youth, faces that would be there on that eve then that would not be present this year. I will be aware that I am surrounded with family, grandparents, aunts, uncles, brothers, sisters, cousins, nieces and nephews and all will be with their husbands and wives, boyfriends or girlfriends and those with children will have them there as well.

That livingroom full of so many memories will hold scores of people this year. I wonder how many of them will be thinking of simpler days and happy memories, faces from days gone, remembering the faces of Christmases past?

End of Essay

Since that was written both of the grandparents featured have passed away, my Grandfather on the 4^th of July, 1996, and my Grandmother this last August 13^th. My two older children are in High School and no longer have Christmas Pageants for me to attend and Rebecca will have only one more (next year) before her class no longer participates in such things. There will be no gathering of the extended family this year – seems that the decades long tradition died with my Grandparents, so I mourn their death once more.

In my day (Good Lord, saying that makes me feel old) we sang Christmas songs like Away in a Manger, and Silent Night at the school pageant. I sadly observe that such songs have not echoed in secular school hallways in many years to my knowledge. My children do not get a Christmas Vacation as I did, they are afforded a Winter Vacation. Maybe I did not notice it in those days but this year I noted that Christmas items were on sale at some stores shortly after Halloween passed, earlier every year it seems.

Having worked through the last few weekends and long hours in between, it was not until yesterday that I finally found/made time to do my Christmas shopping. As I made my way from store to store, shopping center to shopping center I noticed how rarely I heard, "Have a Merry Christmas", and "Thank You." While driving it seemed that people were more vicious and inconsiderate than ever.

Now I note with joy that the rain outside did turn to snow – it is still precipitation, just in a different state. But what a difference that makes, right? There is not a gathering to go to Wisconsin for this year – but with those in my immediate family we will be doing the same here in this house this Christmas Eve. Times change and we cannot change that. But that does not mean that we have to change. I will never again, except in my memories, visit my Grandparent’s house and sing Christmas Carols in their presence but I have children to sing to and to sing to me, and if I am blessed anywhere close to how my Grandparents were – one day, I too, will have children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren in my livingroom singing Christmas carols.

Sincerely,

Mike