“Wake up! It’s midnight! Santa Claus was here.”
At first it’s hard to process my mother’s hand on my shoulder, but her words pierce the haze of sleep. I sit up, rub my eyes once, and then I’m wide awake. I jump out of bed, jam my feet into slippers, and run into the hallway. My brother appears at his bedroom door, and we charge down the steps to the living room, where the tree glistens with lights and tinsel, presiding over piles of wrapped packages.
Our parents watch fondly as we grab and tear, grab and tear, holding up the bounty Santa has brought us. Then we read the little tags to hand out the gifts we all bought each other.
After the gifts are opened and organized into their respective piles and the paper carnage is cleared, the four of us go back to bed. When my brother and I wake at six the next morning, we play happily with our new toys while Mom and Dad happily sleep in.
I assumed all kids woke at midnight on Christmas Eve, but I discovered, once I was old enough to compare notes, that my friends had to wait to open their presents until their parents woke up on Christmas morning.
How tantalizing for them! I felt lucky to observe a custom that gave us the thrill of waking when children were normally asleep, and then having the instant gratification of enjoying our toys as soon as we popped out of bed in the morning.
I don’t know what inspired my parents to follow the midnight gift-giving tradition. Apparently the custom of opening gifts on Christmas Eve comes from Europe, specifically Scandinavia and some central and Eastern European countries. Maybe it was handed down by my grandfather’s Swiss-German ancestors.
Although my father occasionally attended church, my mother was not religious. Our Christmas habits were pretty secular. We did have a nativity set, with a wooden stable and statues of all the major characters, including an ox and a donkey. I liked to set up the scene and bring the wise men in to gather around, with about as much religious fervor as when I played with figures in a dollhouse.
Trimming the tree was my favorite part of Christmas, aside from the presents. On a weekend afternoon in early December, we’d set a ladder on the staircase and climb into the attic. I’d help my mother push a huge square cardboard carton to the attic door, and we’d lever it down to my father.
In the living room, we’d take out the lights and untangle the cords before plugging them in and replacing any burned-out bulbs. Once the lights were placed on the tree, my father dissolved into the background, while the rest of us pulled out the myriads of boxes filled with fragile ornaments nestled among interlocking sheets of cardboard — like boxes of olive oil or wine.
A lot of effort went into creating a balance of different ornament styles among the branches. We made sure the pink and white balls with scalloped indentations weren’t all clustered together. I loved clipping on the metallic birds with sprays of plastic filaments for tails.
An Italian-American neighbor of ours was one of nine singing LaFalce Brothers, and we had their Christmas album, which we listened to over and over while trimming the tree. The record had all the standard carols, as well as some I didn’t usually hear elsewhere — “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel” and “Loo-Lay, Thou Little Tiny Child.”
By the time it was getting dark, we had run out of ornaments. We replaced the empty boxes in the big square carton, to be hoisted back to the attic until January. Then we’d break out the eggnog, turn the tree lights on and the lamps off, and sit on the couch, sipping the creamy sweetness and admiring our sparkly tree while the LaFalce Brothers crooned on.
It was fun to get up and scuff my feet on the carpet, then reach toward a strand of hanging tinsel and watch it sway towards the static charge of my finger. A tiny shock would follow, as tinsel and finger met. Do all kids know about tinsel?
My mom and I baked Christmas cookies together. We made only one kind, butter cookies that we rolled out with a rolling pin. I cut out shapes with cookie cutters: stars, snowmen, Santas, reindeer. I decorated the shapes with sprinkles and with colorful lines of sugary gel, squeezed out of a tube. I collected the scraps left over from around the shapes and rolled them out into smaller and smaller circles, cutting shapes each time, until there was so little left over, I was allowed to eat the rest of the dough raw.
On Christmas afternoon, we had a turkey dinner in the dining room, but this meal lacked the festivity of Thanksgiving, despite the similar menu. It was simply overshadowed by the gifts and the other customs, so specific to the winter holiday, while Thanksgiving was all about the dinner.
I wasn’t sure why my mom bothered with Christmas dinner, but she seemed to feel it was important. By the time I was in my teens, the dinner faded away, as did much of the magic of the other traditions.
But when I was little, the tree and the cookies and the eggnog and the LaFalce Brothers all merged into a splendid Christmas high that I recall, now that I’m in my sixties, much more clearly than the coveted piles of presents. I still crave eggnog every December, although it doesn’t taste nearly as good as it did back then.
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