I am renowned in my family (in this generation, anyway) as the Christmas addict, nut, obsessive, whatever. I don't think it really goes quite that far -- I don't decorate my apartment (or any other space) to crazy levels... I mean, really, all I do from that point of view is keep up the strings of Xmas lights I have in one of my living room windows ALL YEAR... and get and decorate a tree. Surely that's not excessive?!
I do like to do Christmas baking with my nieces -- there's a recipe my grandmother made every Xmas that she got from her mom, who probably got it from the 1910 Kansas City Star newspaper and then doctored with cocoa powder to make it her own. Applesauce cake. And there's a recipe for extremely rich, almost but not exactly shortbread sugar cookies to frost in
Joy of Cooking, which I also like to make with my nieces. Though they're a lot of work. I have an excellent set of cookie cutters which I acquired slowly -- they include your Xmas basics like Christmas trees, wreathes, holly leaves, candy canes, stars, bells, ornaments, stockings, snowflakes, and snowmen... but also a teapot, a couple of different cat shapes, a guitar, a gingerbread (well, some kind of house) outline, and gingerbread people... If we do them this year it will be slightly different because Jiffy stopped producing their packaged white frosting mix, which was PERFECT to color, and which hardened on the cookies perfectly, and which was just sweet and ever so slightly salt-ed? enough to set off the rich cookies excellently. I have scoured the internet looking for anyone who has figured out how to duplicate that Jiffy formula, with no luck. I guess we'll just try out a couple of white boiled frosting recipes, hoping they'll work. Maybe with some lemon, too.
And -- I know this is a minority viewpoint -- I like Xmas music. There are a few songs that I utterly hate and despise*. But I am neither consistent nor tasteful in my Xmas music pleasure. Despite three (four if I count my nieces) generations of atheism in at least part of my family, I have a very soft spot for lots of the more Jesus-Mary-and-Joseph themed music, including some of the hella maudlin ones I heard when I was little. "Away in a Manger," for example. And worst of these, no doubt, "The Little Drummer Boy". I probably have... okay, I counted. I have (I am a bit ashamed to admit this) sixteen versions of "The Little Drummer Boy", including both versions of its mash-up with "Peace on Earth." The David Bowie/Bing Crosby one never fails to make me laugh at how much they obviously loathed each other. I like a lot of the 30s and 40s classics. I like a lot of the older English carols. I love "Lullay, Lullay" aka "The Coventry Carol". I love "Oh, Holy Night" and "Silent Night" and "Good King Wenceslas" and "We Three Kings of Orient Are" and "In the Bleak Midwinter" (not a very California song at all) and "Children Go Where I Send Thee" and "God Save Ye Merry Gentlemen". Almost every year I try to buy a new Xmas music album, though there is not always one worth getting. The best ones I've gotten in the last several years are Low's, Maddy Prior's, Annie Lennox's and Mary Chapin Carpenter's. I have entirely too much Sufjan Stevens, and would like to just delete all five hundred of his songs from the SECOND double album of Xmas music he made.
Maybe I am a Christmas nut.
I said "in my generation". That is because the person who was really taxed by the rest of my family with being a Christmas nut with absolutely firm, unalterable traditions related to the season and the holiday was my grandmother, my mother's mother. The only grandparent I knew, growing up.
I was thinking about her today. There were times when I didn't like her very much, as a kid. She was not a cuddly grandma. She was not particularly nice, or tolerant (of personally known individuals, that is... us, her relations. She was extremely tolerant of people qua people in terms of race, gender, sexuality, etc. When my sister came out to her, as a teenager, she said "Lesbianism always made a lot of sense to me"** and she voted for the Socialist Workers Party from 1968 through 1980, when she felt she HAD to vote against the other 'Onald.) She was critical and extremely, extremely narcissistic. But... but she was INTERESTING. For someone born in 1914, who didn't complete Junior College she never stopped learning or being curious. (Both her older sisters graduated, one with a law degree and one ... actually I do not know that K. graduated college. Betty did. But Jane, my grandmother definitely did not. The sisters had a saying: "K's the oldest, Jane's the youngest. But Betty's the boss." However, even if she felt dumber than her sisters (and she did) she had a little leatherette notebook with hole-punched paper in it with poems she'd laboriously retyped, herself, from those two years of JuCo, I think, in Kansas City, Kansas. From the early 1930s. Her chosen poets included Edna St. Vincent Millay, Dorothy Parker (a lot of Dorothy Parker), Rupert Brook... and Countee Cullen and Langston Hughes. WTF? How did she even hear of poets of the Harlem Renaissance in Depression Era KCK? She wound up in Madison, Wisconsin, a widow with one son still in high school in the mid 1960s, and got a job first at a bakery, and later at an off-brand photo development lab, Star Photo. And once she retired, she took classes at local community colleges, on all kinds of topics. She went to plays, read non-stop, kept lists of books she had read and books she intended to read, noted down questions and topics she wanted to know more about, long before the internet existed to help her to those answers, and traveled all over (well, to lots of Europe, Mexico, and some of South America... never Asia or Africa) with her sister Betty, in their retirement.
And she loved Christmas. Her husband, Dick (Dick and Jane, seriously), an alcoholic who killed himself at age 46, when they were living in Cedar Rapids, was a pretty good photographer and aside from taking endless pictures of her (and she was gorgeous; I am sure I've posted some photos of her in this blog, in the past) documented basically every Christmas they had together from 1936 on. Mostly pictures of a lit up, decorated, tinsel-covered Christmas tree, and pictures of their three kids with Christmas toys, unwrapped. There's one I like a lot because it doesn't just blur into a succession of black and white Christmas trees in various living rooms (they moved AN AWFUL LOT), but shows my grandmother, in the late 1940s, I think, either starting to decorate the tree or taking the last few decorations off. I can't tell which. Maybe decorating? It's a more candid photo; less posed than most of hers.
Her other inflexible Christmas customs included making the aforementioned applesauce cake, making rum and brandy balls (a recipe doubtless gotten out of a magazine in the 1950s), offering portwine cheese for fancy-ish flavored crackers, having Xmas music on A LOT, decorating a Christmas tree, making cloth dolls for my sister and I (and her own daughter, before us) including Raggedy Anns and matching outfits for us, listening to THE Christmas album of my childhood and the music I play first after Thanksgiving, which is a Kingston Trio album called
The Last Month of the Year, and listening to the Midnight Special radio show.
She was never bored, or boring, even if she was sometimes unkind, and always hard to reach, emotionally. Her older brother, her husband, and her older son all committed suicide. That's a lot. But I miss her. I wish I'd asked her more, though I did try, and I do know some of her family stories. She was very alone after Dick killed himself and did not seem to have a gift for making friends. I can't ever think of Christmas entirely without her. I wish my nieces had gotten to know her; she died when Ruby, the elder, was only one year old. I remember getting a call at work, teaching, in West Oakland. I was called to the Office, in early June, 2002, and they told me (I guess my mother had called, from Chicago, where my grandmother lived with her in a Rogers Park co-op apartment right on Lake Michigan). An older woman, maybe the assistant office manager, who I didn't think had much interest in me, who could probably have retired long since, Ms. Lee, hugged me as I absolutely broke down in tears.
Anyway, I am stuck with the family role of carrying on her tradition. And it's not so bad.
*"I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus", which as a child I really thought was about an affair... not necessarily with Santa, but also not a kiss with the father, dressed up. Don't ask me about all my childhood insecurities and weirdnesses, please! "Frosty the Snowman". Depressing. And saccharine. (Not that some of my favorites are not that latter...) "Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer". Ugh. "Jingle Bells" and also "Jingle Bell Rock". "Santa Claus is Coming to Town". I think those are all the ones I hate the most and won't have on a playlist.
**and she had, I guess, a lesbian sister-in-law who was her own ball of messy contradictions... absolutely a dyke, with a long term relationship, but also a paranoid racist in Missouri. Sigh.
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