Julia Buckley grew up in the south suburbs of Chicago with her parents and four
siblings. She now lives closer to the city with her husband, two sons, four cats
and a dog. She is the author of THE DARK BACKWARD (2006) and the MADELINE MANN
mysteries (now on Kindle). Her other titles include THE GHOSTS OF LOVELY WOMEN
and GINEVRA BOND (A young adult suspense novel). She will soon debut her
romantic suspense novel, COUNTERPLAY.
The Ghost of
Christmases Past
by Julia Buckley
I’m sure everyone feels nostalgic at Christmastime; after
all, it’s a festive holiday, but it’s also a way to mark the passing of the
years. So I remember bits and pieces of
many Christmases past—Christmases spent with my boys when they were little and
yearning for gifts with innocent desire.
A Christmas spent with my first child, just two days old. The Christmas my husband proposed to me. Christmases spent with my parents and
siblings, sitting in a circle in our living room and reading A Christmas Carol aloud to each other
before Midnight Mass.
A few distinct memories jumped into my head as I
contemplated writing this little essay, so it is those memories, those tenuous
windows into the past, that I will share now, as a way, I hope, of making your
holidays more merry.
Once, when I was tiny and it was Christmas Eve, we went out
somewhere and, as usual, my parents dressed my sister and me in pajamas at
whatever place we visited (probably my grandmother’s house) because we usually
fell asleep in the car on the way home.
When we arrived, though, I woke up, and as my father carried me toward
the house I expressed disappointment that there were no signs of Santa. “No sign?” he asked me. “Look up there!” He spotted the red light of an airplane in
the sky and pointed at it. “Do you
think—well I’ll be—I think that’s Rudolph!”
Yes, my father said that, and yes, I believed him. I was so excited I almost couldn’t fall back
asleep. Later I heard the distant
jingling of bells outside and felt that special combination of joy and terror
that is a child’s anticipation of Santa Claus.
It warms my heart now to think of my father going out in the dark with
one of my mother’s bell-covered decorations and shaking it under his daughters’
window.
In another Christmas season, when all five of us children
still lived at home (or perhaps my oldest brother was home for college), my
parents were gone somewhere, and the Christmas decorations had not yet been put
up. My brother suggested that we
children should put them up as a surprise—an idea we all liked. So we got the boxes out of the attic and
started decorating in the way that tradition dictated: Santa statue here,
nativity scene there, German elves on the bookshelves. My brother and oldest sister had the window
lights laid on the floor, deeply involved in the untangling. These were the big ol’ industrial Christmas
lights that you saw everywhere in the 1970s (and again now, as nostalgic
touches). In order to make the job
easier, we plugged the lights in so that we could see which needed replacing
and where they might still be tangled.
It was a lovely scene—siblings working together, not fighting, sharing
the joy of holiday anticipation.
Then my brother lifted the strand of lights and we saw,
horrified, what we had done. The hot
lights had melted our carpet. Black,
waxy spots burned into the green fuzz showed the pattern of where the lights
had been. We all looked at each other
with the recognizable “We’re in trouble”
faces. How could we possibly explain
this?
As it turned out, my parents weren’t angry. My parents, to their credit, were rarely
angry. My mother must have been
broken-hearted when she looked at her living room, but she and my father
commended us for doing such a good decorating job and for taking the
initiative. I’m sure they felt relieved
we hadn’t burned the house down.
Carpeting is expensive, and we didn’t replace the damaged
one right away. So several seasons
passed during which we saw the black imprints of Christmas lights as we walked
back and forth in our busy living room.
Oh, and a last beautiful memory: my mother’s Christmas
table. My mother slaved over Christmas
for weeks beforehand, making and freezing cookies and cakes so that everything
would be ready for her three-day spread.
There were spritz cookies and homemade fudge (my nemesis, which I could
not stop eating and which gave me a stomach ache); there were German cakes like
Bienenstich and Dobos Torte (which is also Hungarian). There was chocolate marzipan sent from
relatives in Paderborn. And oh, there
were cookies: Russian tea cakes and sugar cut-outs, pinwheels and angel-wings,
chocolate snowballs and strawberry kiflis.
There was wassail and eggnog. My
mother wore a beautiful apron, hand-embroidered, that was never covered in
food. We would sit around her table full
of treats, eating and singing. There was
always singing in our house: in German, in English, in Hungarian. Christmas happens in every language, and joy
knows every tongue.
I hope you have a wonderful holiday, wrapped in your own
happy Christmas memories!
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