My Mom, the Queen of Christmas

My mom, Ann Kozlina Gilbride.

To begin my December series of Christmas-themed posts, I'm borrowing some writing I've done for our son on my own memories. He gifted me with the book Questions You'll Wish You Asked: A Time Capsule for Mothers and Sons,* by Melissa Pennel, for Mother's Day a few years ago. It's filled with prompts to encourage the recipient to write about their own life experiences.

This prompt was: What was your favorite thing about your mother? The original post was written to our son, James, on 7 July 2024. I'm retitling it "My Mom, the Queen of Christmas."

 

One of my favorite things about Memaw was the way she loved to celebrate the holidays. You probably remember how she would go all out to decorate the house, bake all sorts of goodies, find all the perfect gifts, wrap them just so, and artfully arrange them around the tree. 

Once all of us kids were a bit older—after the divorce and once Mom found her footing again—I think that she really enjoyed making the holidays what she wanted them to be. I suspect they were not anything like what she had as a kid, and probably different than what she and my dad gave us.

That's when the fun really started. Mom would ask us for our Christmas lists and those lists would go into her purse to refer to whenever she was out shopping. Until all of us kids "learned the truth," she had us write letters to Santa, and then she'd write back in loopy letters, always in red marker, and leave the letters on the table after nibbling a bit of cookie and drinking the milk we had left for Santa. (And that is where that tradition came from!)

I borrowed the Santa letter reply idea from Mom for our kids. Here's one cheeky reply to our daughter.

When it was time to decorate, the entire house got a cleaning from top to bottom, including washing the walls (she rarely repainted). Then the tree would come out. At this point, we had the larger fake tree that was kept in a big box in the attic at the top of the stairs. Each branch had a color-coded end so that we knew which order they went on when assembling the tree. But before the assembly, one of us kids would help to throw the branches down the stairs—a rare opportunity to throw something in the house! It was such fun. 

Christmas morning at Memaw's before the chaos, 2001. Note cookie plate and milk glass bottom right.

 

Mom would always play her favorite Christmas albums (LPs in that time): Johnny Mathis, Andy Williams, Bing Crosby, all the old crooners. We have those songs ingrained in our heads from the number of times we heard them. Just hearing the opening notes would make us all feel jolly and Christmas-like.

As the years went on, there were more and more holiday decorations, and nearly every room in the house had some sort of decoration. When I was still playing with Barbies, she even went so far as to help me create a Barbie holiday scene complete with mini, gift-wrapped presents and a miniature tree. She had it bad!!

Then there was the baking, the wrapping, the ornaments. For years we would have my Mom's side of the family over one weekend for a party, and then the next we would have my Dad's side.

Christmas traditions kept up even as we got older, moved out, got married, and had our own kids. We kept going to Cleveland as long as we could when you kids were little, until it just got to be too expensive to fly four of us out there. And we wanted to start our own holiday traditions with you and Anne at home, and not have to have several Christmases (ours, Papa's, Memaw's, etc.) every year—though I know you and Anne didn't mind that! LOL!

Christmas and Mom are completely linked in my mind. Even now, when I bake, when I wrap gifts, when I send holiday cards, I still think of all the memories she made for our family when we were growing up, and how much joy it brought her, even if it was hard work to accomplish. It was definitely one of my favorite things about her.

Memaw and her three grandkids, Anne, James, and Rachel, 2001.

 

P.S. For those of you that look forward to the annual retelling of "Mom's Chocolate-Covered Cherry Caper," never fear, here's a link: https://myleavesonthetree.blogspot.com/2019/12/moms-chocolate-covered-cherry-caper.html.

 

 

 

Until next time... 

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© Nancy Gilbride Casey, 2024. All rights reserved.

* I am not endorsing purchasing the book on Amazon; it was just the first link that came up.