Nostalgic is Me!

I have loved the winter holiday season for as long as I can remember.  I was lucky to grow up as an only child.  That means that my parents spoiled me indiscriminately, my grandparents and aunts and uncles doted on me.  It also means that I was very close to my parents.  So when the holidays roll around, and I now find myself an older adult with my father deceased and my mother's mind mostly gone, the memories of good times around a family circle really are very precious.

My family now - a blended family, one that holds to the "Jesus is the Reason for the Season" kind of thinking -- don't think too much of the tree trimming, the caroling, the Christmas stockings, Santa Claus, and all that.  And to me (aside from Midnight Mass in a tiny and old-fashioned Catholic parish church each year), all those things DEFINE the holiday season.  And I miss them deeply.

My grandmother from Massachusetts would ride the train down to the city, and when I was young, we would drive in, my mother and I, to meet my Dad at his office, and then we would all go and pick Nana up, to stay with us for a month or so.  I probably felt most unconditionally loved by my Nana more than anyone else.  She baked sweets for us.  She decorated Christmas cookies with icing and those little silver balls.  She crocheted and tatted -- tatting was a complete mystery to me until it made a renaissance a couple of years back and I taught myself to tat.  I will never match the fine pieces that Nana could make though.  She used such fine thread and she could tat so quickly and easily.  I get mixed up by some of the directions.  I remember that as I got older, once I asked if she would teach me to tat, and I was hurt that she refused.  Now that I probably AM the age she was then, I can better appreciate that when you can't see that well and your hands are not as nimble, it is no longer such fun to show someone else how to do a craft.

Some years we would drive up to Massachusetts too.  Then I could play in the snow with the downstairs neighbor children!  There was a Christmas tree lighting.  We also sometimes drove to Pennsylvania, my mother's home state, where a Christmas Boulevard and great music my Uncle Joe kept playing made for a more ethnic but warm, happy holiday even if there was some snow and ice on the trip and on the ground.

My family continued to gather at Christmas time, although once I was out on my own, it tended to be for an adult evening of listening to the Ceremony of Carols on BBC Radio (this was before satellite and cable and way before the internet, mind), and a late supper if we stayed up and went to that Midnight Mass.  We still surprised each other with stockings, and I used to really love finding funny or practical small things to fill up stockings with on Christmas morning.  We even tried to maintain the charade that Santa came and filled them, we would hide from one another as we filled the socks up.

Life now, especially with Mom in a memory care facility, seems to make Christmas just another day.  It makes it worse that the facility (which is remodeling and throwing residents into worse confusion) has made it known that they want to change Mom's level of care -- meaning, she needs to have more complete assistance.  Not only has life stolen my Mom from me, and all of the good memories that we used to make together.  In fact I find that the holiday season may wind up holding some of the sadder memories.  My Nana died around Christmas as I was about to graduate from college -- but I was still just a girl then.  Now as I consider that my Mom continues to decline and I die a little along with her, the thought of the holidays commemorating Mom taking another step down, makes it that much harder to celebrate at all.

I never knew what the holiday blues could possibly be, but these days, I know.