As the holiday season comes 'round again, traffic backs up and checkout lines surge, I can't help but remember back before Christmas was less about finding the perfect gift and more about having the best experience. Stripped down, what is Christmas? Dare we call it Christmas if indeed it is stripped down? Perhaps it's not about stripping down Christmas, but rather peeling away the superficial layers to reveal the deeper parts, complete with homemade goodies, family traditions and love.
When I think of Christmas, I think of the Sears catalogue. The first week of December always brought gusts of cold wind and the biggest magazine we got all year, complete with 500-plus pages of toys, clothes and random grownup stuff. We'd sit, dog-ear pages, circle the perfect baby dolls and monster trucks, and dream about Christmas morning. OK, so not all traditions are anti-materialism. However, some are. At my house, Christmas means two (crooked) trees. One a vision of Southern Living decorations, complete with boughs of magnolia leaves, gold ornaments and white lights. The other? Live, colored lights and gaudy with every decoration we ever found in a cereal box or made from glitter and Styrofoam. Also, at least 12 feet tall, even if that means driving over 300 miles round trip to find it.
Christmas is the cookie dough my grandma made, replacing the sugar portion with salt, then trying to compensate by adjusting the recipe and nearly filling a bathtub with the resulting batter.
It's waking up without power, opening gifts with gloves on and moving to a hotel to enjoy dinner at the Waffle House down the road.
It's leaning to the left in pictures to make the tree look straight, never getting coal, going to candlelight Christmas Eve services and singing even though the wax is burning your fingers and all you want to do is go play outside in the few flurries that make their way to Alabama. It's using all the snow in the yard to make one tiny snow gnome, and praying for a flash freeze while sitting on the sled at the top of the driveway.
It's waking your siblings up at 6 a.m., even if they're nine years older, and only later appreciating that they never yelled, "It's all fake! Go back to sleep."
Granted, not all holiday moments were quite so sparkling. I feared Santa and his strangely old and tall holiday elves, and the terror of Santa continued until third grade when (stop reading if you're under age nine), I had carefully picked out my wish collection from the Sears catalogue. My mom was carrying in sacks from the car when I noticed the corner of a bright pink box. "Don't look!" she said. The next morning, that bright pink box appeared under the Santa tree. I took one look at the box and thought, "Mom is going to be so sad when she sees that Santa brought me the same thing she did." Needless to say, that wasn't a great morning, and I never did like that doll.
But, the crowning Christmas crisis moment must be awarded to my older brother and sister, the ones who didn't out Santa during the wee hours of the morning. My parents decided to enlist them as "Santa's helpers," basically meaning they stayed up late to help build, dress and decorate anything complicated my other brother and I might have asked for.
One year, that was an eight-foot G.I. Joe aircraft carrier. Lloyd and Kristi saw the sunrise as they followed the complicated "one-step" directions, laying the last caution stickers on the final set of tiny stairs in time to grab a few hours of sleep before Todd and I burst in for the annual wakeup call. They rubbed their weary eyes and followed us to the Santa tree. "Cool!" Todd exclaimed at his newest battleship addition. "This is — hey, Santa put the stickers on crooked!" I might've been only four, but I swear I remember my mom restraining my sister.
Take a minute this Christmas to flip through holiday pictures and remember old traditions. It's likely that yours are pretty unique and important, at least to you. Enjoy the music, sit by the fire and remember that not everything on your wish list should be purchasable online. I'll take a "stripped down" Christmas any day, just don't forget the trees. Ashley Johnson is an English major from Florence, Ala. She can be reached at ajohnson@princeton.edu.
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