December stuff

My holidays as a kid were a little different than my holidays now.  Since we were often quite far away from where my mom’s family lived in southern Illinois or my dad’s family in northern Indiana, there was often just the five of us.

We lived in a trailer most of my childhood..oh, excuse me. I meant mobile home.  The first one was tiny ~ 8 feet wide and 40 feet long.  I don’t have a lot of memories of this one, just the fuzzy few photographs and snippets.  The next mobile home was 10 feet by 50 feet.  My parents referred to it as “The Anderson” years later; the manufacturer.   

I don’t have a lot of things from my childhood as, well, you can imagine. There was no place to keep anything! I may have a report card or two and maybe a drawing.   I think my mom may have bought new Christmas decorations every year or something, until I was older, because I don’t remember decorations being pulled out and hung with great care.  This might speak to my yen for collecting things, although clutter is getting less and less attractive to me.  

When we were close enough to get there, we would travel to my mom’s hometown at Christmas.   My mom had been married before she met my dad and had two boys.  Those two brothers lived with my grandmother, so in order to spend the holidays with them, we traveled when we could.  I had a uncle, named Dude, with three daughters close in age to my sister and I.  We really loved visiting them.  My Aunt May and Uncle Dude would get a huge “flocked” tree every year and I thought it was the most glamorous thing ever.  It was so much bigger and grander than anything we could put up in the little trailer.  My mom’s sister and family often traveled up from Florida as well...they also had two girls close in age to us.  I just realized my younger brother, always a “man’s man”, must have been mortified during these visits!   

These memories are busting through the cobwebs of my mind this blustery December day.  I get a little sad during some of these memory walks, as I think most of us do, when we think of times we no longer have.  I don’t have contact with any of my cousins.  I don’t know their families or their homes.  We never made a solid connection with each other, I guess because we only saw each other those one or two times a year, if then.  Each of my uncles passed away, and their wives, and I wasn’t at their funerals.  My older brother Darrell lives the closest to the old town, and is in contact with what remains of my mom’s family, but, that is also a thinning thread.  

Yesterday, surrounded by aunts,  uncles, cousins and a great grandmother, my little granddaughter made her first Christmas cut out cookie.  She heard Happy Birthday sung to her by her large family.  She ran and giggled and dodged and played.  She heard laughter and banter, and licked sugar off of her sticky fingers.  It was a great cookie and memory making day.  I wish the same for each of you...make memories.