I’ve probably told this story already on the blog, but I’m too lazy to look it up and besides, who doesn’t like frequently re-told tales? For us old folks, that’s all we got.
Anyway, when I was in my single digits, I shared a room with my younger sister and we had bunk beds. These were not your standard, store-bought bunk beds. My grandfather made us these bunk beds. They were wooden with cubbies built into the head and foot boards for our stuff. They also had larger cubbies on the each end of the bunk bed, which we used as a bookshelf on one end and I think Barbie and My Little Pony storage on the other, if memory serves (and it frequently doesn’t). I had the top bunk and my sister had the bottom.
At Christmastime, my mother would go full ham on the decorations in the house. We rarely put up anything outside, but inside there was Christmas shit everywhere. My mother had a Christmas village that she’d set up on a table. A papermache angel that she’d made in high school would sit in the middle of it (if you even thought about touching it, Santa would give you more than just coal in your stocking). She had crocheted Santa Claus doorknob covers that made it impossible to open doors and the Christmas countdown chain and/or the cotton ball Santa beard countdown among the other decorations we’d bring home from school.
And of course we had a tree. Some years it was in the living room foyer, crowding the front door, which made us grateful we only used it to get the mail. Other years, it’d be put in the dining room near the windows, right next to the bedroom my sister and I shared. I liked those years best because I could fall asleep with the glow of the Christmas tree leaking into our room.
Decorating the tree was a big deal. Like many people, we had a collection of ornaments of sentimental value that always made it onto the tree. I made a Rudolph tree topper in 2nd grade that topped the tree for years. My grandmother had made everyone their own wooden ornaments of various figures, painting them and putting our names on them. Most of them have been lost to time, but I remember I was a rabbit and my sister was a deer. The only ones I still have are my grandpa’s –a drum major- and my grandma’s –a drum. I don’t have a big tree anymore, but I still hang those two ornaments up every year.
My favorite thing, however, was my stocking, which along with my sister’s, was hung on the end of the bunk bed with care.
Over the years, I had a few different stockings, but my favorite was, of course, one that my grandma made. My sister got one, too. For years everything we had was matchy-matchy, but in different colors. Both of our stockings were crocheted with little stuffed snowmen that fit in the top. Mine is green; my sister’s is red.
When Santa still stopped by our house (the presents Santa left under the tree were always the ones my mother didn’t want to wrap), my sister and I would know that he’d been there because after he’d fill our stockings, he’d put our snowmen in bed with us. Of all of my childhood Christmas memories, that’s my favorite. Waking up incredibly early against my will -thanks, Lulu- to find my snowman next to me. My sister and I would then empty our stockings and check out what Santa had brought us before moving on to finding what Santa had left under the tree.
Honestly, it was a brilliant move by mother. The snowman signal allowed us to raid our stockings and bought her a little more time to sleep (our dad worked nights at the time, so he usually got home around the same time we woke up our mother to officially start Christmas). It also created some extra special holiday magic that I still think about to this day.
Fortunately, I found our old stockings years ago and I sent my sister’s to her. I hang up mine every year on my bedroom door. I’ve had to sew up some holes and sew Frosty’s eye back on, but it’s otherwise in pretty good shape.
Santa doesn’t stop by my house anymore, so I don’t wake up to find Frosty in bed with me on Christmas morning, but that stocking still has some magic left to it.
It’s filled with Christmas memories.
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