Holiday Tradition

A few days ago, snow fell for the first time this year. It finally felt like winter. The doors to our cars have been frozen shut every morning since. I have to pound on them with my frozen fist, beating around the outline of the door, trying to break the thin ice seal that holds the weather stripping fast against the metal frame. Tonight, when I arrived home and stepped out of my car, I breathed in deeply through my mouth; my throat caught, protecting itself from the biting cold (it's supposed to get down to -4 degrees Fahrenheit tonight) , and I coughed spasmodically, and my throat burned.

I'll eventually tire of these inconveniences and long for spring, but right now, I am glad for these manifestations of winter. Winter is a time to retreat indoors for the long night; it's a time to savor Saturdays in the snow; it's a time for hot chocolate and soup. It's also when Christmas happens, and Christmas traditions have been on my mind lately.

Having children and watching them experience some of the same traditions I experienced has given these annual acts new meaning for me. Each Christmas ritual Sonora performs reminds me of one that I did, and conversely, it makes me think of my parents, when they were younger, and then my whole sense of childhood returns, if only for a few moments. These traditions seem to collapse time, sort of like a compressed accordion; multiple generations connect. Often many generations of a family do gather and re-connect at Christmas time, but even when I am not with my brothers, sisters, parents, and grandparents at Christmas, I feel linked to them through memory and association.

Here are some of the memories that have presented themselves so far in the build-up this Christmas:

Elizabeth has sewn each of us a stocking. These stockings are clean and cute and personalized. We've never hung them from a mantel piece above a fireplace because we've never lived anywhere that had such a thing. When I was a kid, we only lived for two years in a house with a fireplace and a mantel. Otherwise, we hung our stockings from thumbtacks pushed into the wood-panel walls. Our stockings were not very clean and weren't particularly cute. Mine had my name on the white cuff. It was made out of a fleece-like material. What I remember most about it was the hard candy stuck inside the toe of the stocking. Each year, another piece of candy seemed to attach itself to the mass of hard sugar that had somehow latched onto the material. I would pick at the candy lump, but wouldn't tear it out for fear of ripping the stocking. Besides, I never have really liked hard candy, so I wasn't sad it was going to waste.

Most of our presents are wrapped in reusable cloth gift bags Elizabeth sewed a few years ago, but one of the presents I purchased was too large to fit in any of these bags, so I had to wrap it in wrapping paper. When I was young, we had a family present-wrapping ritual. My mom and dad would hide most of the presents under their bed and, when it was time to start putting gifts under the tree, my parents would call us into their bedroom one by one to wrap gifts for our siblings. My parents had a bedroom at one end of our single-wide trailer-house. Their bedroom was removed from much of the commotion experienced in the rest of the small dwelling. When I would go in there to wrap gifts, it always seemed quiet, still. Part of this sense of peace was due to the act of wrapping. Under my mom's guidance, I had to concentrate on cutting the paper to the right length, wrapping it carefully, so as not to rip it, taping it in the right spots, and finally, creasing the ends in the right places so that the paper neatly hid the contents of the gift. Sitting on my parents' bed in their quiet room, keenly focusing on a task, the experience felt almost sacred. For some reason, I am sure that my mom, when she was a child, sat like that, together with her mom, wrapping gifts.

The Christmas of 2003 was the first one Elizabeth and I spent in Washington. We didn't have a Christmas tree, and we were conflicted about buying a real one, conflicted because they were expensive and because it seemed a waste to support cutting down a 10-30 year-old tree just so we could have a "real" tree in our house. So we decided to buy one. In fact, it was her sister Camille, who was living with us at the time, and I who picked one out from a wide selection at a local thrift store, and hauled it back to the house. Elizabeth and I are still using that same tree; Sonora helped me assemble it this year.

But one thing I do miss about not having a real tree is the pine smell. When I was a kid, the family would drive to the 10-acre lot of land we owned about 5 miles from where we lived. The land was covered with juniper and pinion trees and we would tromp around in the snow, looking for the perfect tree. For us, however, the perfect tree was one with identifiable flaws that my mother insisted on: it couldn't be too big (it pained my mom to think of us killing a mature tree that had struggled as long as she had against the extremes of the high deserts of southwestern Colorado); and it had to be growing very close to a larger tree (her reason for this qualification was that, if the little tree was growing close to a larger one, it was likely to die anyway, so we weren't making too big an impact on the Pygmy forest). Once chosen, each of the kids would take a turn swinging the dull hatchet my dad had brought along and then we would haul off the meager beast and set it up in a corner of the living room. It was always in a corner because we wanted to do our best to hide the limbless side--the side that had been growing against the larger tree--from view. No matter how far we shoved the tree into the corner, though, it still looked a little shabby. But it always smelled as good as the full trees my friends put up in their houses. My grandparents, great grandparents, and great-great-grandparents all spent a lot of time in those high deserts and would have had similar trees. Sometimes I feel guilty when I think about how Elizabeth and I have changed the tradition by using a fake tree, but we live in Washington where there are no pinion or juniper trees of the varieties my ancestors would have known, so a fake tree isn't so bad.

When I was a kid, almost every Christmas, we would make gingerbread houses. For the gingerbread, we would use graham crackers glued together with a powdered sugar/egg/cream of tartar frosting. The trick was to handle the crackers carefully and hold them in place much longer than you would think necessary to allow the frosting to set. But Elizabeth is a purist. She makes the gingerbread from scratch. It's an all-day process of mixing and chilling the dough, rolling it out to a certain thickness, cutting out patterns, baking the pieces, putting them together, and decorating them. A couple of years ago, in addition to a house for herself, Sonora, and me, she planned and made an elaborate gingerbread train.

This year, we just did houses and a small train.At first, I was opposed to all this work. "Let's just use graham crackers." I said. Elizabeth acted as if I'd profaned a sacred institution. We've never used graham crackers. But I've come to appreciate these dark, hand-made, fragrant, thick-walled structures. I've come to understand that they are fleeting works of art similar to Navajo or Tibetan Buddhist sand paintings that are intricately constructed for traditional ceremonies and then swept away. Sometimes the construction of something is what matters, even if the final product is impermanent.

This year, Elizabeth's magnum opus was the Advent calendar. She worked on it at night for many nights after the kids went to bed. This is not a cardstock open-the-box-and-get-a-cheap-piece-of-fake-chocolate Advent calendar. This is one that will last until we die. The first thing Sonora does each morning is to excitedly take an ornament from the appropriate pouch and hang it on the cloth tree.

My family didn't do Advent calendars. I didn't even know what one was when I visited a friend's house in my early adolescence and they had one of the cardstock ones. When he explained it to me, I was excited, but the chocolate for that day had already been eaten, and I then revised my opinion: this now seemed to me a stingy way to approach the build-up to Christmas.

I'm excited to add Elizabeth's calendar to the list of traditions. Even though the memories are only a few weeks old, I already remember with fondness watching her plan out and slowly construct this addition to the Christmas atmosphere. And it is fun to have a tangible countdown to the 25th.

I'm sure that, as is the case with the Advent calendar, every so often we will add a new memory to the list of those we revisit each year. Hopefully, our kids will take these with them, the most lasting of the Christmas gifts we give them, and carry them into their lives to give to their children.