Christmas Past

The Green of Homer, New York, at Christmas

Many people travel for the Christmas holiday, typically to visit family or friends. Generally, I did not. When I was very young, as in three years or less, my family would travel to the homes of other family members for Christmas. Apparently Lisa’s family did that until she was about ten. But my parents wanted us to have our own family traditions and customs for Christmas, and, apparently at about age four I started to show a preference for spending Christmas at home. So most of my early Christmas memories have been based in the village of Homer, in upstate New York.

Another view of the Homer Green.

Christmas was almost always white. Upstate New York is famous for it’s snow, and for a time it was a major hub for winter sports. The 1980 Winter Olympics were held in the Adirondack mountains of Upstate New York.

Christmas at the Pugh residence usually started on Christmas Eve. We tended to have a light dinner, because we were often snacking on cheese, crackers, and holiday sausage all evening long. Typically one of my parents would be frantically doing the last of the gift wrapping in some secret corner of the house, while my brother and I watched live Christmas music on one of the PBS stations.

I used to spend hours just looking at the Christmas tree, especially when every other light in the house was turned off. Several of my original science-fiction stories (currently tied up in editorial hell) trace their origin to those Christmas tree meditations.

Christmas morning started at seven AM. My parents had a very strict rule about this. We could not, repeat, could not enter the front room until after everyone was up and about and breakfast was served. And we (my brother and I) could not awaken our parents until seven AM or later. So naturally, Christmas began at 7:00:01 exactly.

Coffee cake!

For many years, Christmas breakfast was a home-made coffee cake. Mom’s coffee cake was to die for! The body of the cake just melted in your mouth, and the topping had just the perfect amount of crunch. However, for reasons we never understood, mom would end up aspirating on some of the topping, resulting in her coughing for several moments. It became a running joke. It shouldn’t have, but it did.

The area around the Christmas tree rapidly became a dumping ground for discarded wrapping paper, and more often than not, my parents were napping by lunchtime. My brother and I, of course, had toys and games to break in, so we never napped. Christmas dinner was usually pretty impressive. It wasn’t as massive as Thanksgiving, but it was certainly substantial.

Alastair Sim's Christmas Carol

Finally, after dinner, we would all sit down and watch Alastair Sim’s version of Christmas Carol. More often than not, that version was all over the dial, so it was rare that we couldn’t find it on one of the stations. In later years we acquired a VHS copy of the movie, so we no longer had to worry about finding it.

This pattern continued, largely without variation, through Christmas of 1992. By then, I was in graduate school and my brother in college. But we still made a point to come home for Christmas. That changed in 1993. My father died unexpectedly in May of that year, so when Christmas arrived we needed to do something different. For the next few Christmases we again traveled to different locations, usually with family. By 1996 we had settled back into a variant of the old pattern, and often my grandmother or aunt were there as well.

By Christmas of 2006, my brother and I both had young children. Instead of Homer, my brother’s house in Maryland became the primary gathering point for Christmas. By 2013, the house in Homer had been sold, thus closing the book on that long era.

Today, the Culpeper Pugh’s typically spend the first part of Christmas at home, in Virginia, then travel to Maryland later in the day. When I was young, it was important to me that I had some of my Christmas in the place I called home, and have some little traditions of my own. I want Caitlin and Michael to have that option as well.


Christmas of 2014, however, turned out to be different.

More about Christmas:


Image credits:

Gallery

Thanksgiving photos, 2014

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We took surprisingly few photographs this year. Probably because we spent most of our time actually talking to one another, rather than pressing buttons on electronic gadgets. (Shock! Horror!) But still, we got a few. This photo shows my mom with her four grandchildren (from left to right): Caitlin, Michael, Connor, and Will.

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My brother, James, managed to get this cute image of Michael playing with one of his birthday presents. Things with wheels, and things with buttons are his favorites. This particular toy has both!

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Happy birthday, Lisa!

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Lisa Vedeckis was born on this day, in Chicago, Illinois, to Wayne and Mary Vedeckis. I suspect Lisa would prefer I not mention her exact age, so I won’t.

I’ll admit that this particular year has had some real broadsides – like the one on the side of the house – but we made it through! Are you ready for the next one?

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Photobomb!

These photographs were taken at the Red Lobster in Fredericksburg, Virginia, which is one of Lisa’s favorite restaurants.

Thanksgiving Memories

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Thanksgiving. Turkey Day. Festival of the Harvest. Stuff-your-face-day.

Call it whatever you want. The fourth Thursday of November is the day the citizens of the United States set aside to acknowledge and give thanks for whatever good fortunes life has given them. The holiday has some religious connotations for many, but on the whole it has long been considered a civil holiday. It probably has its roots in the harvest celebrations of the Pilgrims and Puritans of colonial New England. Harvest celebrations are as old as civilization itself. It’s just that the denizens of the Massachusetts Bay colony (both the natives and the imports) managed to do this particular dinner party with such gusto that Thanksgiving as Americans understand it is often credited to them.

Different countries have their thanksgiving holiday on different days, depending on when the harvest traditionally comes in. The closer you are to the Arctic Circle, the earlier in the year the harvest. That’s partly why Canada, for instance, has their Thanksgiving holiday in October. I suspect if you did the research, you could find harvest holidays every week from October through December, somewhere in the Northern Hemisphere.

But enough history. A lot of people like to share memories they have associated with Thanksgiving. For me, I’m afraid it’s pretty pedestrian, but amusing in its own way. I grew up in Central New York, and by late November, snow and ice had usually moved in for the winter, and that tended to put a damper on things. As such, my family didn’t always travel, though occasionally we would have friends over.

Thanksgiving at my house usually started with getting up early enough to watch the Macy’s Day parade. Like most kids, I waited impatiently through the musical numbers and scores of marching bands just so I could see the balloons and fancy floats. As I got older and started studying music I developed a greater appreciation for the bands and musical performances, especially some of those precision band drills. By the time I was a teen I had also acquired an appreciation for the flag girls, majorettes, and of course the Radio City Rockettes. Though I suspect that had more to do with the really short costumes and my being a teenage male than it did with dance routines and parade drills.

After the parade was finished, we would have a very light lunch, with the aim of saving room for dinner. Mom would then hand my brother and I an assortment of vegetables, fruit, and loaves of bread, which we were instructed to chop up while watching King Kong. I never understood this, but every Thanksgiving, one of the regional television stations in New York City – I think it was WPIX – ran a group of giant ape movies. They usually started with the original King Kong, followed by Mighty Joe Young (also the original), and then some other ape movie. Some years it was Son of Kong, others it was King Kong versus Godzilla, and there were other titles in the rotation. However, by the time the third ape movie came around, dinner was close to ready, so we often missed it. And we were OK with that, because by that point we had been glued to the television for as much as eight hours, and our eyes itched.

All those vegetables my brother and I chopped up (carrots, potatoes, turnip [yuch], broccoli spears, and celery), and the loaves of bread (which became the base for the turkey stuffing), morphed into a traditional Thanksgiving dinner that couldn’t be beat. My mom followed her mom’s example when it came to Thanksgiving dinner, so no one left the table hungry. And even if you were full after dinner, there was still dessert, usually three different types of pie. (That’s where most of the fruit went.)

After dinner, the various leftovers were packed up into serving sized containers which we would live off for close to a week. The dog was treated to a handful of table scraps, and some poor soul was assigned dish washing duty. My dad often got stuck with that one. In later years, when we had an automatic dishwasher, it became much easier. After that there wasn’t much more to do, so the day quickly wound down. Given our collective tryptophan-induced stupor, that’s not surprising.

Now, there were some years when we traveled for Thanksgiving. One of our more common destinations was the home of my maternal grandparents in Lawrence, Massachusetts. As large as my mother’s Thanksgiving feast was, my grandmother – I called her Memere – took it even further. Her feast was enormous! At the time I had several extended family members in that part of New England, and it was customary for all of them to descend on Memere and Pepere’s for Thanksgiving dinner. The side dishes numbered in the double digits, and one year there were two fifteen pound turkeys! Sometimes Memere would have two or even three sittings. It’s rather hard to describe, but one of Memere’s Thanksgiving feasts was certainly an experience.

But then, I probably don’t have to describe it. I’ve heard many people tell of similar family feasts, and some families still have them when they can. So I suspect most people have been to such a gathering, be it Thanksgiving or otherwise.

For the past several years, Thanksgiving has been at my brother’s house in Maryland. The drill is oddly familiar to the one I had growing up, only without the ape movies. Usually my nephews and daughter are watching a DVD of a Disney movie while the rest of us go about preparing dinner. This year will have the added challenge of herding my very ambulatory two-year old son and preventing him from getting into everything and anything. I will also be singing at church that morning, so we’ll be arriving later in the day than in past years. I suspect in years to come the children will have their own version of this essay, where they talk about the amusing and memorable things that happened on Thanksgiving Day.

But you know what one of the best things about Thanksgiving Day? It is little essays like this one, or rather what this essay describes. My father has been gone for over 20 years. At the last few Thanksgivings in Homer, New York, there was a noticeable absence at the table. But I still remember him, very clearly. My maternal grandmother has been gone for over ten years, and she hadn’t done one of her massive feasts for roughly another five before that. Many of the extended family that I used to see at these gatherings have also passed on. Others, I’m sorry to say, we no longer have contact with, because of a major schism within the family a few years back. But I can still see all of their faces.

Memories, big and small, funny and sad, touching and inspiring, are precious things to be collected, remembered, and cherished. And once a year, be sure to give thanks for them.

Happy Thanksgiving.


Image credits belong to SpicesCafe.com, and Thanksgiving Day 2014.