Well, here it is, a few weeks before Christmas and everyone is in a flurry of activity and anxiety to choose just the right gift. Was it really simpler when I was a child, or has time just eroded my memory?
Men, all men, either got a tie they didn’t want or a bottle of Old Spice. That’s all I recall the women in my family buying for their spouses, except for my Uncle Jimmy who was an Aqua Velva man.
Women got returnable jewelry from their men or some horrible black and red thing from Frederick's of Hollywood (but only if they were still very young). Once, one of my aunts got a football jersey, with her husband’s team on it of course. One Christmas, another aunt received a new iron from her husband for Christmas. I will never forget the look on her face as she opened the box and took out her new Sunbeam iron. It was the same look I’ve seen on the show “America’s Most Wanted”, the look the serial killer has before he reaches for the claw hammer. My uncle, clueless to the last, chimed in, “It has pulse steam.” Well, I know something was steaming that day, and it wasn’t the iron.
Christmas money went for the kids and dinner. We had real game back then that you could play right out of the box, no instructions or batteries needed. We had Rock Em - Sock Em Robots, Skittle Pool, Mystery Date game, and I always loved getting a jigsaw puzzle. Nobody got toys that needed batteries because that was a nuisance toy for the parent.
Naturally, we all wanted our parents to play with us, but by the time Christmas morning came, they were so burned out on us that they would force themselves to play with us for half an hour and then feign death on the couch. You could wrap their heads with paper and they wouldn’t even care. You could hide their cigarettes and they still wouldn’t make one move to stop you, that’s how tired they were.
One of my cousins picked the crumbs off the crumb cake on the coffee table right in front of at least seven adults and lived to tell the tale. That’s how you really knew you had them beaten to a standstill. Under any other circumstances, picking the crumbs off the Entenmann’s Crumb cake would have brought a swift slap to the back of your head. And this was in the day that no other adult would step forward to defend you from the child abuser, matter of fact, they got in line to yell or slap you.
Crumb cake etiquette was, and still is very exact, you may only pick your own crumbs off of your own piece. Crumb poaching is not allowed and has started many fights in many families. You didn’t want to get a reputation as a crumb poacher, because then everyone would keep an eye on you at all times, it was like being a drunk driver today. If you’ve gotten a DWI in the past, people watch what you drink at parties, unless you’re smart enough to drink before the party. Same with crumb poachers, best to eat some Oreo’s or Lorna Doones to take the edge off before the party so you aren’t tempted to poach.
Around noon, food would begin to appear. We had the usual fights about who could sit at the grown up table and who still had to sit at the kids table. The grown ups would eat and talk in code, spelling every other word as they spoke. Deciphering adult spelling codes created a steep learning curve for all of us. I attribute half my vocabulary to time spent trying to figure out what in the h-e-l-l they were trying to say. If they were spelling it, it was a curse word, or a really good piece of gossip, or worst of all - it was about you. There was no texting in those days, you learned to spell, or like a flattened fly, you got crushed between the pages of the dictionary of life. After dinner came the desserts, including whiskey cake and rum balls, and these were not dormant items. Our parents knew that the alcohol burned off in the baking process, so more whiskey was added after the cake came out to maintain it’s flavor. We were all allowed to eat rum balls and whiskey cake after dinner. And after that, I don’t recall anything but waking up the next morning in my pajama’s with a puck from my Skittle Pool game stuck to my face.
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