Christmas traditions keep family memories alive

Christmas is a time for family traditions that remind us not only of holidays past but also of the people in our lives who created some of our earliest, most cherished and vivid memories.

Usually our traditions are handed down from generation to generation, mostly, I am convinced, because of our mothers and our grandmothers. My mother was the one who kept our Christmas decorations safe, carefully packed away at the end of the holidays in a giant White King laundry detergent box.

And among her most cherished items was a lighted five-point star she had ordered for the family tree top when she was but a child helping my grandfather at his electrical shop by handling routine chores while he was busy solving customers’ home electrical problems.

By her account, she placed the order without him knowing and he wasn’t pleased when it arrived. But they must have worked it out, because that star topped my family’s Christmas trees for decades.

One of my great-grandmothers contributed my favorite Christmas cookie recipe, which was a bit vague on instructions and amounts, originally assembled no doubt in the days when sometimes you made do with what was at hand — and in your memory. But when I make Great Grandma’s chocolate drop cookies, I can still smell their butter, brown sugar and Baker’s chocolate as vividly as when my Mom pulled them from the oven and then made a dark chocolate frosting from powdered cocoa and powdered sugar.

Traditions also are created in each new generation as families tie marital bonds and learn from one another, sometimes creating something as improvised as that old cookie recipe appears to be.

Among ours is our Christmas dinner menu, now about 30 years old, inspired by my wonderful mother-in-law, the late Ruth Ayers. When our two younger boys were still preschoolers, she had come for the first of what became her traditional holiday-season visit.

Juggling jobs, kids, meals and all the Christmas preparations is a monumental task for young parents, and we were no exception. During Ruth’s first holiday or two with us, it all was complicated by the “some assembly required” toys that my wife Patti and I had not had time to put together before Christmas Eve.

As I recall, it made for a late night, and the next day was both long and brutal, with the holiday meal preparations for turkey, mashed potatoes, dressing, cranberries, pies and everything else consuming the afternoon and reaching into the evening.

Patti and I were exhausted by day’s end and, I confess, I was a little grumpy. The very next year, we began a new tradition, started by Ruth.

A couple of weeks before her visit, she called one evening to let us know her flight schedule and to confer about gifts for the boys. And then she suggested, “How about I send you a check for a different kind of Christmas dinner this year — steak and lobster? Then we can spend most of the day playing with the kids and talking, instead of cooking.”

We quickly agreed. Every year since, we’ve made a Christmas meal that requires minutes, not hours, to prepare and cook. So long as we roast a turkey sometime during the holidays, we’ve never felt we were missing out.

Instead, we remember fondly Patti’s wonderfully innovative Mom, who created a tradition we embraced and have passed on to the next generation.

This story was originally published December 23, 2018 at 2:49 PM.