CHAPTER 10

WINTER HOLIDAYS

BORN IN THE LAST YEARS OF THE 1970S, MY CHRISTMAS MEMORIES begin with the vintage cool of Sinatra and Bing Crosby on vinyl, Crown Royal in the grown-ups’ glasses, and lots of scratch-baked treats. With just a few years’ time, the memories evolve into a 1980s rainbow explosion of plastic toys and prepackaged Christmas sweets, as the number of family members, namely children (my first cousins), began to increase.

But it’s the earliest Christmases that cemented my opinions of what the holidays ought to be, and what I go back to in my mental files each December. In that living room in my grandparents’ 1950s ranch house in Rolling Meadows, Illinois, the lights are low, some walls dark wood-paneled, others covered in chaotic, vermilion paisley wallpaper. The Christmas tree bowed under the weight of multicolored lights, ornaments crafted by little hands from salt dough and pipe cleaners, and those silvery shreds of tinsel no one seems to use anymore. (Was it found to be cancerous, much like everything else? Or did people just get tired of the beaters of their vacuums getting suffocated between December and January?)

Additional decor included a glossy green, hand-painted ceramic tree, lit up from within and covered in confetti-like colored lights, a DIY project that was all the rage in the ’70s (I recently rescued one from a flea market to put this memory back in my own house). A bright red velvet bow was stuck on each of six framed 8 × 10 school photos that hung on the wall adjacent to the tree, one for my mother, frozen permanently as a high school senior, and the rest for her older brother and four younger siblings. In the kitchen, there was the terry cloth hand towel with a crocheted handle, my favorite bit of Christmas kitsch emblazoned with “Merry Merry” on one side and “Happy Happy” on the other. One could enjoy its festivity and usefulness well into January by simply reversing the way it hung from the sink cabinet.

The Christmas treats I remember the most, of course, are the cookies. Archway Cherry Nougats (RIP) were the thing I whined for the most at the store. But there were plenty of scratch goodies, too—shiny gold Hostess fruitcake tins, the fruitcake long since eaten, filled with Christmas cookies. Toll House chocolate chip cookies no larger than two or three bites, and crisp, minty meringues tinted pale green and studded with tiny bits of chocolate, which we called “forgotten cookies.” The star of the show for me, though, were my Gramma’s sugar cookies, sandy, crunchy, deep with buttery flavor, and always scattered with coarse rainbow sanding sugar, which may not have been textbook Christmassy in its colors, but it was perfect to me. It was in a corner of the front room, crouched low with greedy handfuls of cookies, that I listened to the strains of Andy Williams coming from the hi-fi, wondering what gifts I might score.

Thinking back to those years, it seems the outside air was colder, and the insides warmer. Christmas break was guaranteed to be snowy, and our little bodies would be alternately damp with snow and damp with sweat, our feet stuffed into plastic sandwich bags inside our boots as waterproof insurance, wool itching on our wrists and foreheads as we pulled our sleds up to the top of the hill once more. It was a simpler, greedier, more delicious time.