Last several days, I’ve really started focusing on prepping for the holidays. Most shopping done, and now the big thing for me is cooking and baking. As I sit here this morning researching some recipe pieces I seem to have lost, I find myself being awash in memories, and their emotions, of holidays past.
I have a Mirro Cookie Press that my ex and I bought when living together. I use to do a lot of cooking for my family when I was young, because my mom felt I could do some baking better than her. When I was around age 12, she started handing off certain recipes recipes to me for holiday prep – spritz cookies, spicy cherry bells, teatime tassies, and sticky buns.
Somewhere along the way, I seemed to have lost the recipe booklet that came with the cookie press…you know…the little yellow one. I’ve always loved the spritz recipe in there, so I went to the web started looking for the recipe. While looking, something about reading people’s posts about the Mirro Cookie Press, their mothers and grandmothers, gave me chills this morning.
My own mother passed away in ’84, and our family quit coming together for Christmas shortly thereafter. She was the pivot, the magnet of the family. My sisters and I live in all corners of the country, with one being a pastor, and then with their kids being at all corners of the planet it makes it hard to pull everyone together. Mom’s death was followed two weeks later by my grandfather’s death, father’s side. The two of them helped define Christmas for me. My ex did as well, and we separated 6 months after my mother’s passing.
I’ve know for a long time that at this time of year, I miss what memory shows…intimate connection, laughter, memory making. I quit erecting a tree a number of years ago in my singleness because it has no power for me but in its linking the joy of relationships. Living in the boons, single, with a highly mobile circle of friends who flee the area for families elsewhere in the country, makes the tree too quiet, too lacking in inspiration for me. I love big 9ft blue spruce as trees, filling the house with the smell of evergreen, and challenging you to get it back out of the house without needles to be found in July. It seems too 'present' for just me to enjoy.
Christmas for me is above all, a celebration of relationship. In that, I’ve always written poetry as gifts, gifted with baked goods, and given great attention to the wrapping of gifts. I love using feathers, and shells, things of nature that speak of seasons, and not necessarily winter. I learned a long time ago to do fun and fancy things with bows, and the end result was always the comment…”I don’t want to unwrap this! It’s like a sculpture!” I knew I hit the mark when I watched that effort of people to save the creation adorning the wrapping.
In this process of aging, lacking children, I find the holiday season more and more challenging as close associates and friends are further and further away. It’s fun to get friends near and far things you sense strongly they’ll enjoy, but lacking the contact of eyes and the voice in your ears, the giving lacks some important dimensions for me. Lacking kids, I find Christmas also lacks a certain sense of wonder, sense of the innate glee of year-end abundance celebrations.
Too often now, in this crazy consumerist society, people complain about Christmas being too materialistic, too this, that or the other. In a season meant to celebrate relationship and abundance long before Christianity absconded with the holiday, this was a time to mark a thankfulness and humility in the most base of relationships…person to planet…then person to person. For me, this fundamental nature of relationship and its required interdependence still makes this time of year so rich and warm…
But I admit...I miss the touch, the smells, and the laughter, that spoke of close circles, intimacy, and shared journeys.
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| Ahhh...Christmas as Memories |
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