My sisters and I are on the phone this time of year, remembering.
“Remember Mama’s icebox fruitcake? She’d put it in the vegetable bin so we couldn’t find it.”
I don’t know why she thought she could hide it.
I, and apparently my sisters, would wait for everybody to go to bed and then we’d sneak into the refrigerator and grab handfuls of the gooey confection made of graham crackers, marshmallows, cherries and condensed milk. We’d smooth the log back into place so she wouldn’t know.
“You did that?” my one sister said, feigning horror.
“I did that too,” she said, ho ho ho.
Mama did more than make and hide cake at Christmas. She was Everything Christmas, the 24/7 wrapper and baker and crafter who donned her reindeer apron the day after Thanksgiving and didn’t take it off until there was a green-and-red net Christmas tree on the stand-up radio in the living room and presents halfway up the tree.
Christmas was when Mama came alive. A typical '50s-'60s mother, her life was the stoic mother drudge of chipped beef on toast, Girl Scout meetings and beating off the demons left by the bitter Depression era mother who raised her.
At Christmas, Mama and the Catholic Church gave herself permission to open to the joie de Noel and all that mother magic inside.
There is the legendary story of Mama locking herself in her bedroom and making Barbie outfits, complete with matching hats and purses.
And the attendant story of the clothes being put in a box some months later under the carport and the sanitation department mistakenly taking them away, never to be seen again.
“Remember all the presents?”
We all remember the presents. They were small things. We know now we didn’t have a lot of money. But she wanted us to have many things to open, even if they were socks and undies and strings of lollipops.
If she parented by Dr. Spock, Mama kept house by Ladies' Home Journal. The only time I smelled alcohol in the house was when she made bourbon balls with vanilla wafers and Karo syrup like her colleagues.
“Remember the wreath she made of Styrofoam cups to look like bells? And the time she tried fruit cake?”
The one time.
The cake turned out dry as dirt. She never made fruitcake again.
“I just remember how happy Mama was at Christmas.”
I remember her singing “Silent Night” one night in the car. Her mean-as-a-Grinch mother always told her she had a terrible singing voice. But on this crisp night a few days before Christmas, she raised her high soprano voice and sang her girls to our own silent night, as we passed Kmart on our way home.
Christmas Day, of course, was the showcase. The four of us would race into the living room in our chenille robes and curlers, Mama’s face aglow as we discovered Chatty Cathys and Easy Bake Ovens and always the great oversized illustrated books she managed to save enough to buy.
We’d unwrap hats and scarves Mama would have made for us to wear to Christmas Mass, so many Little Women lined up in a row beside our Marmee.
And then it was on to the full schedule Mama created, and the multiethnic food — from church to Lebanese Big Mama’s kibbeh grapes to Mama Syracuse's turkey and cabbage rolls to Southern Grandma Bledsoe’s pralines.
Christmas was a satisfaction of the sacred, the secular and the family.
But as much as anything, it was a celebration of Mama.
We are no different than other families in that we each have our own perception of what it was like growing up one of Audrey’s Girls. There are difficult stories and lacks.
Meanwhile, at Christmas, Mama provided a common entryway into the unrelenting generosity, love and magic we all look for.
She is why I cherish all the trappings of Christmas.
She is why I feel her with me now as I wrap and craft and bake and sing and stack socks and undies halfway up the tree.
We wished it would last forever then.
We wish it now.
