Christmas Nostalgia

This blog post has been floating around in my head for a couple of weeks as the activities of this year's Christmas season bring back so many wonderful (or just memorable) memories from my childhood. Here are some of those memories:
1. The smell of cinnamon rolls - I am sure by now most of you know that I am a cinnamon rolls making fool around Christmas time. And I totally come by it honestly. My mother would start the month of December with a 6' stretch of counter stacked two deep with flour, yeast, sugar, brown sugar, powdered sugar and cinnamon. Over the course of two weeks.Sometime around the last week of school in December, I would come home every afternoon to the smell of baked or baking cinnamon rolls. By Christmas I am pretty sure that 50+ 12" wide cinnamon rolls + plates of their cousin the lemon twist made there way out of her oven. We would spend several days delivering them to the shut-ins in our church, friends, Daddy's clients, and anyone else she could think of that needed some holiday cheer. I don't know how old I was when I got to start helping her make them, but by the time I was 9 or 10, I could spread the butter, cinnamon, & brown sugar like an expert. I began baking them the year I got married and hope to pass the passion for baking on to my kids, too.
2. Family - For better or worse, my mother was an only child which meant that for her mom and a childless great-aunt - we were it. So every year they would come up about a week before Christmas with the intentions of giving Mama a break from her 3 (then later 4) rambunctious children. We would spend HOURS making sure the fire in the fireplace didn't go out, playing scrabble, monopoly, candy land, and go fish, "helping" Mama cook, reading books, and watching old Christmas movies.
3. Candy - This one is somewhat an extension of #2. My childless great-aunt always seemed to me to be one big kid until the day she died. She loved laughing, playing with us, and oh boy did she love sweets! About the time that 6' stretch of counter was being cleared of flour,etc, Aunt Cile would show up with about 12 LARGE tupperware containers of every kind of Christmas candy you can imagine - Divinity (with & without nuts), chocolate fudge, peanut butter fudge, marble fudge, haystacks, peanut brittle. By the time New Year's Day rolled around - those boxes were empty. It is a wonder we didn't all develop childhood diabetes from it all, but it probably wouldn't have stopped us from inhaling it all. Peanut butter fudge is still my favorite to this day. I still haven't found anyone else who makes it as good as she did, though.
4. The Christmas Play - every year our church had a Christmas play - old school style - all the children dressed up like the characters and played out the Christmas story. A few years we mixed it up and told it from the animals or the shepherd's perspective, but usually it was just the plain and simple story of Christmas. We had bathrobe shepherd's w/ terry cloth towels on their heads. We had cotton ball covered sheep, angels with gold tinsel halos, and one year I think my baby brother played baby Jesus. I don't think I played anything besides an angel, but my one memory is my friend Allison always sang a solo of "Thou Didst Leave Thy Throne"
Thou didst leave Thy throne and Thy kingly crown,
When Thou camest to earth for me;
But in Bethlehem’s home was there found no room
For Thy holy nativity.
O come to my heart, Lord Jesus,
There is room in my heart for Thee.

I always remember that because I always wished I could sing that song, but it was a horrible key for my childhood voice and she always made everyone cry.
5. Christmas Day -
* Stage 1 - Christmas morning usually started up around 6 am when one of my younger brothers would wake us all up. Now the rules at our house was that no one went downstairs without EVERYONE else being ready. That meant that not only did Marianna & I have to get up, but the previously mentioned Mammaw and Aunt Cile had to be ready. This eventually became somewhat hilarious because Mammaw wore both a wig and hearing aids, my aunt wore false teeth and Marianna and I both had contacts to put in. You can imagine what the four of us (and our bathroom counter) looked like all trying to get ready at once. We would joke there wasn't a complete head between us!
* Stage 2 - In an effort to make sure we were focused on what Christmas was really all about, we would gather downstairs in the big center hallway of our house and Daddy would read us the Christmas story from the Bible. He would start with the Old Testament prophecies in Isaiah and Micah and then read at least two gospel accounts of Christ's birth. We were usually fidgeting and distracted by the thoughts of Santa Claus' loot on the other side of the door to living room, but I still love, more than anything to meditate on God's Promised Deliverer and how Jesus is the fulfillment of those promises.
* Stage 3 - As soon as Daddy would finish, we would burst through the door of the living room and about kill each other trying to get to our gifts first. Our Christmas' were never filled with the coolest toys of the year - the year the Cabbage Patch kids were all the craze, my mother made us our Cabbage Patch kids, complete with forged birth certificates. I hated that doll that day, but the next day I named her and she stayed on my bed until every piece of yarn hair fell out of her head! One year Daddy made my sister and I cedar chests from lumber he had cut on our farm. Our stockings were filled with oranges, pecans, toothbrushes, toothpaste, and if I was lucky, some bows are clips for my hair. Sometime between the mad rush and noon, we would eat breakfast, and the rest of my family would appear. I had another great-aunt, my father's parents, and 8 first cousins on my father's side. By the time everyone got there, my mother's living room floor was 2' deep in shredded wrapping paper and gifts.
* Stage 4 - Family gifts - It is funny how different family members give very predictable gifts. One aunt was notorious for giving the toys that were the absolute loudest and most annoying thing she could find, Another was the pajama aunt, and another always gave us books to read, but the last gift of the day was always Pop giving us a commemorative silver dollar or a savings bond. Boy, did we think we were rich!

All of my grandparents and great-aunts and even my sweet Daddy have passed away now, but the memories they gave me at Christmas will never die. I hope that my children's Christmas memories will be just as sweet.

MERRY CHRISTMAS, EVERYONE!!!