Hands down, my mom’s absolute favorite holiday was Christmas. Unfortunately for those of us left behind, that can make Christmas even more sad. Last year was my family’s first Christmas without her, and for me, I feel like I just powered through. This year, I’m feeling more nostalgic, so I thought I would take the time to write some of the things I remember about mom at Christmastime.
My mom always put up a fake Christmas tree, and it was always up around the second week of November. Her excuse was she liked to look at it while we ate Thanksgiving dinner… which was fine except we never did Thanksgiving at our house when I was a child; it was always at my great aunt and uncles’s house in the country. She put her tree up in early November ever since I can remember, and this was way before the trend caught on the way it has now. When I was growing up, my friends thought that was so strange. Most of them had real trees and waited until closer to Christmas to put their trees up. She was meticulous about fluffing the branches so there were no holes, and she loved decorating the tree with tons of ornaments. When I was little it was also covered in strands of white pearls, red bows, and an angel on top. She was a maximalist when it came to decorating a tree. Most of the time the tree had white lights, but there were a few years where she got bored and switched it up with colored lights. Together we’d listen to Christmas music, often a Carpenters Christmas CD - her favorite, and decorate the tree. Under the tree she liked to put old toys: some of hers - a baby doll in a small crib, some of my dad’s - GI Joe and Inspector Gadget, and some just vintage ones she liked - a Fisher Price Two Tune TV and Little Snoopy dog on a string.
The tree wasn’t the only thing she decorated with. She’d let me set up the nativity, only to go back and rearrange it the way she wanted once I had finished. She also liked to have the outside of the house decorated with icicle lights that my dad would hang and wreaths on every door. When I was in high school she got a blow mold nativity for the yard. It was super tacky, but she was into it. She had a running joke with one of her coworkers about my dad loading the nativity blow mold people into his wagon to bring them to the front yard and baby Jesus falling out of the wagon along the way.
My mom was definitely an over shopper when it came to buying gifts at Christmas. She was an avid QVC shopper, so it was guaranteed that at least one of our gifts, if not the majority of the stuff in our stocking, would be from QVC. Growing up, my sister and I got both Santa gifts and gifts from mom and dad. Our gifts from mom and dad were wrapped, but she never wrapped our Santa gifts, which is such a controversial subject with my husband’s family. As an adult I totally get not wrapping Santa gifts and can see why mom did that, but she argued her own Santa gifts were never wrapped, nor were my dad’s, and that it was a “southern” thing. Let’s be honest, not wrapping was strategic on her part. My sister and I would wake super early on Christmas morning, like 5 am early, and see all of our gifts set out around the tree and on the couch in the living room. We were spoiled with too many presents each year. Mom always talked of the year Kasey got a Nintendo and a Super Mario Brothers game. Mom and dad had just gotten married that year and since Kasey was spending Christmas with her dad, she got to open gifts early. Mom said she and dad spent Christmas playing Mario for hours.
Mom would wrap the presents from her and dad, and as I got older she would make me help, including wrapping gifts for myself after she would tape the box shut so I wouldn’t peek. What she wasn’t good at, was putting name tags on the gifts after wrapping them, causing her to guess whose gift was whose. I remember several Christmases of her sitting in the floor on her knees watching me or Kasey open a gift, with her mouth straightened and to the side in a quizzical look. She would say to me as I was unwrapping a present, “Wait a minute… that’s Kasey’s.” Or vice versa. I’ll be damned if last year I didn’t do the same thing. 🤦🏼♀️ I don’t even remember whose gift I mislabeled, maybe Turner or Allen’s, but when it happened all I could think was, I got it honestly.
My mom always told me her favorite Christmas movie was It’s a Wonderful Life. She would rant and rave about how much she loved that movie, so when I was a teenager I recorded it on TV for us to watch together. I had never seen it before, and I thought it was pretty dark for a Christmas movie, but we kept watching it. About halfway through she looked and me while laughing and said, “Britt, I have to tell you something. I have never seen this movie before.” 😂 She did, however, LOVE The Grinch, the original one from the 60s. She herself was a real life Cindy Lou Who, and even had a t-shirt that said so. She also loved a cheesy Hallmark movie.
She always told stories about what Christmas was like when she was a child. She told me she’d get an orange in her stocking. She said she’d always get a book of Life Savers candy, so I can’t see those in a store at Christmas and not think about her. She told me she and her sisters would each get a box of Whitman’s chocolates to wrap for one another and would be told they were all getting something different, but of course they’d realize that wasn’t true on Christmas morning. She said their tree was always covered in silver tinsel, and that the smell of scotch tape would always remind her of Christmas. She told me about getting her baby doll and how excited she was; that was the one she kept and would put under the tree. I know her Christmases as a child weren’t extravagant or very memorable and that’s why she did her best to make mine and Kasey’s magical.
Mom had a Christmas tree pin she wore pretty much everyday staring the day after Thanksgiving. It was from Avon and gold tone with bedazzling to look like ornaments hanging on the tree. We have so many pictures of her at Christmastime wearing it pinned on her sweaters. My sister has it now and pinned it on her stocking.
Mom loved Christmas music. I think half of all the CDs she owned were Christmas CDs. She would start listening to Christmas music way earlier than the radio stations would play it, so she had to have Christmas CDs. She loved the Carpenters Christmas music, along with a lot of their regular music. Her favorite Christmas song was Mary Did You Know, which has always seemed to me to be a too serious of a song and a little creepy. She also loved Christmas in Dixie and Hard Candy Christmas. She said when she used to sing Silent Night to Kasey as a baby for her first Christmas. On Christmas Eve we used to church and then go to my grandparents’ house for to eat dinner and exchange gifts. I usually got a CD as one of my gifts and I would be dying to listen to it in the car for the short ride home. Mom would always tell me no. She’d say we can only listen to Christmas music for one more day, my CD would have to wait.
Mom loved going to Christmas Eve service at church. Our church did a very simple, but beautiful candlelight service. We would sing songs like It Came Upon a Midnight Clear, Joy To the World, and Silent Night. At the very end we all sang a cappella by candlelight. She loved having this Christmas Eve tradition of church followed by Nan and Pop’s house.
She also loved trying new things at Christmastime to make new traditions. Our family did the Bethlehem Walk at Salem Baptist in Goochland, we went to Christmas Town at Busch Gardens, we did the Tacky Light Tour, we went to see The Nutcracker. Mom was into anything Christmas-y.
On Christmas Day my sister and I would usually wake up at the crack of dawn, open presents, eat breakfast, and then play with whatever we got. After that we usually went over to my Aunt Rhonda’s house to see what our cousins, Zachary and Taylor, got as gifts. As we got older, Mom started hosting her family at our house on Christmas Day. I don’t ever remember her being stressed or tied up in the kitchen too much. She just cooked our meal and all hung out together. It was all very laid back and low key. Once my sister had her first child we rearranged our usual Christmas schedule so she could stay home on Christmas morning. Our family started exchanging gifts at mom’s on the 23rd of December. We’d decide on what to eat well in advance, one year we did pizza, one year we did seafood, whatever anyone suggested. We’d eat dinner and open presents. Mom liked that we could have a relaxed night together and have an “extra” day of Christmas.
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