I Need a Little Christmas, obviously

Yesterday’s post was a bit of a downer, so today I’ll share with you some of my favorite things about Christmas, both past and present.

• Cinnamon rolls on Christmas morning. My mom made them every year (except that one awful year when she made egg casserole instead (ha – just kidding Mom)) and she’d put them in the oven to warm while we opened presents and it would smell just heavenly. Now, when we stay in NC for Christmas, I make the cinnamon rolls and I have to say, they’re my best “dish.” This year I’m going to try Alton Brown’s recipe.



• Christmas dresses. We always had something new to wear on Christmas Eve, and up until I was, I think, a junior in high school, that “something” was handmade by my mom. She always sewed us the most gorgeous dresses, and we often all matched (well, not my brother, of course). I loved putting on my new dress and feeling pretty.



• Christmas Eve services at our church back home. The church was always decorated with poinsettias and lit with candles. My mom would play something special on the organ, and the choir would sing. Then we’d all get to light our own candles and sing “Silent Night.” The “true meaning” of Christmas would always hit me right about then.



• Chocolate crinkles and my mom’s spritz.



• Grandma Shaffer’s noodles, which I haven’t had for a very long time. And, now, my mother-in-law’s pierogis – I was a bit suspicious of these the first couple of times I had Christmas over there, but now I love them. Well, except for the sauerkraut ones.



• Scraps from my mom’s holiday baking. Mom makes everything from scratch. When she makes a pie crust, she takes the scraps and sprinkles cinnamon sugar on them and puts them in the toaster oven, and the resulting, um, “pie crust thingies” are delicious. And when she’d make cinnamon rolls, she’d always give us a little slice of dough before she put them in the pan.



• My mom’s advent calendar, which she handmade with felt and little tiny sequins and beads. There was a tree on the top half, and 24 pockets on the bottom, each with an ornament inside. It was so much fun to take a “surprise” out of the pocket every night and pin it on the tree (even though it was hard to take turns with my siblings). I have a beautiful advent calendar now myself (which in fact my mom found for me), and Mallory loves it, but it’s not nearly as magical as that old felt and sequin one.



• Have you noticed how many of these feature my mom and something special she did for us around the holidays? (Or, food?)



• Decorating the Christmas tree. I received most of my ornaments through the years as gifts from my grandmothers, so it’s always fun to get the ornament boxes down from the attic and unwrap them all and remember who gave me what and when. It’s like opening a treasure chest. And I don’t hang this one up any more because it’s too fragile, but my very favorite ornament is a Dixie cup covered in fabric that my Great-Granddad Baize made for me in 1976, when he was in the nursing home.



• The thing we do at my mother-in-law’s house before Christmas dinner which I can’t spell or pronounce. It’s a Polish tradition; basically we all get a piece of holy wafer and share it with each other and everyone hugs. It’s very nice.



• “The Friendly Beasts.” We sang this song in our church Christmas pageants when I was a kid. Garth Brooks has a version of it too. It tears me up every time, especially this verse:
  I, said the dove from the rafters high,
  I cooed him to sleep, that he should not cry.
  We cooed him to sleep, my love and I.
  I, said the dove from the rafters high.



• Going to Grannie’s house for Christmas Eve. Obviously we haven’t done this for a very long time. I still miss it.



• Watching my kids celebrate Christmas. The first year Mallory really “got” Santa was after she turned 3…she woke up on Christmas morning and yelled, “It’s Sritmas! I’m going to run and see what he left for me!” She dashed to the top of the stairs and said, “Well, I think I’ll walk downstairs.” That was also the year I was pregnant, and I knew I was going to have a girl because every day, Mallory would go up to this Precious Moments ornament on our tree and say, “Hello, little sister, you look very pretty today.” Last year, she told her music teacher that Phoebe could be the baby Jesus in their pageant. This year, Phoebe is in awe of the Christmas tree – she laughs at it and says, “Pree!” for “pretty!” I know I buy them way more presents than I should, but I just love celebrating with them. I hope when they grow up, their Christmas memories are just as happy as mine are.

That’s much better.