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My Christmas Memories
The Gift of Family
“Our hearts grow tender with childhood memories and love of kindred, and we are better throughout the year for having, in spirit, become a child again at Christmastime.” ~Laura Ingalls Wilder
In conjuring up my earliest Christmas memories, I’m taken back to when there was just Mom, Dad, and me. We were living in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. And I was still eager to point out that my birth had transformed my parents from being “just” a couple to being a family.
Here’s what I remember: When I was a child, Christmas was simple. My parents bought a fake tree from Woolworths. Every year we’d take it out of its ever-softening cardboard box, bend the branches back down and away from the twisted metal trunk, and attach it to its plastic stand. Once we’d gotten it looking like a tree again, we’d decorate it with tinsel boas. It stood three feet tall, so with each Christmas that passed, I could use it to assess my growth.
I don’t remember many ornaments on our Christmas tree other than the pinecones my mother and I had gone to the Brooklyn Botanic Garden to collect, brought home, spray-painted silver or gold, and then dusted with glitter. However, I do remember the plastic…
