Flashback Friday - My Childhood Best Christmas Gift

Hard to believe that I posted this story five years. Not much has changed since then. This dollhouse is still in my basement, neglected but no less loved. 

I can’t remember the year, I’m just not that good, but I was probably five or six years old. Or maybe I was only four. Sometime that particular fall, my sister Pat and I were banished from the garage. I remember trying to peak in the window, but I just wasn’t tall enough. I remember wondering, wondering, wondering what could be going on in there. What was Dad doing in the garage late into the evening. Why wasn’t he spending nights on the couch watching TV with us like usual.

Christmas morning there was a note on the tree. Pat read it and her eyes grew larger. She ran for the basement stairs, and I naturally followed.

There it was at the bottom of the stairs. This wondrous dollhouse. a three-story A-frame with real stairs and built-in kitchen cabinets. Mom had made curtains for it and cardboard living room furniture, upholstered in real upholstery fabric. The kitchen floor was covered in the same linoleum as our kitchen upstairs.

And the adventures we would have. Or I should say, the adventures our dolls would have. We were only interlopers, giants manipulating their lives during the day. At night, we truly believed, their lives went on without us.

It’s in my basement now, and hasn’t been played with in years and years, as you can tell by the dust. Much to my dismay, Val never really played with it. Maybe because she didn’t have an older sister showing her the way. Or maybe coz Super Mario Brothers was just more exciting.

I don't know if any other little girls will ever play with my dollhouse. But as much as my husband gives me a hard time about getting rid of it, it's not going to go anywhere. 

Flashback Friday - Christmas Cookies

I first posted this five years ago. I'm trying to figure out when I will make my roll-outs this year. It's not looking good.

Every year, without fail, when I was a kid growing up at home, the Friday after Thanksgiving was the day to make roll-out Christmas cookies. In the afternoon, Mom would roll-out and bake double batch after double batch. Then in the evening, after a leftover turkey supper, we would get to work decorating them, assembly line style.

Mom would frost them, always and only with white butter frosting. Then my sister Pat and I would trade off sprinkling them with the proper colored sugar, green for trees, red for poinsettias, yellow for bells. Whoever was not sugaring, would put on the accessories. A few mulitcolored sprinkles on the trees, three (no more, no less) silver non-pareils in the center of the poinsettias, two red cinnamon beads for berries on the holly. They were all beautiful - and all exactly the same. It never even crossed our young minds to be creative and try something new. We were too afraid of throwing Mom off. (I think she was menopausal my entire childhood.)

As each cookie sheet was filled with cookies, Dad would take them to the deep freeze in the basement. Once they were frozen they would be carefully and categorically stacked in a huge round Tupperware container to be returned to the freezer until Christmas.

When Christmas rolled around, as the Christmas cookie platter emptied every other day or so, we ventured into the freezer to fill it with Spritz, Peanut Blossoms, Christmas balls, and our beloved roll-outs. There were so many cookies down there and Mom was so stingy on dispursing them, that sometimes the Tupperware container didn't empty until February.

Luckily, Pat and I kept an eye on the situation and whenever we were playing with our toys in the basement, we would snitch a cookie or two. Mom pretended that she didn't know, but now that I'm a mother, I know better.

Christmas Tree

The Christmas Tree

Every fall, just as the weather was getting cold and the snow was sticking to the ground, the young farmer would take his ax and wander into the small forest behind the simple house he shared with his wife. Every year he would cut down the finest fir tree he could find and he would drag it back to the house.

Each year all of the trees hoped that they would be the one chosen. They would stretch their branches and look full and majestic. The scrawny jack pine at the edge of the wood hoped each year that he would be picked, but he never shared his hopes with the other trees as he was sure they would just laugh at him.

One year, a disease descended on the farmer’s herd of cattle and many of them were lost. Late summer rains flooded his fields, ruining half of the crop. The farmer’s wife was pregnant with their first child and he was desperate to make any money he could.

That fall as the first snows were falling, the farmer went into the forest and cut down the biggest, tallest, fullest fir tree he could find. Instead of taking it home, he dragged it to the manor house to ask if the lord would like to buy the fine tree.

The lord of the manor did indeed pay for the tree, enough money that the farmer and his wife would have food to eat through the winter. The lord did remind the farmer though that he was only allowed to cut one tree out of the forest each year for Christmas.

The farmer returned to his home, very happy and thankful that he had a pocket full of money but also sad that he would have no tree for Christmas. His wife assured them that they didn’t need a tree, that they should just thank God that the wealthy man who owned all of the land that they lived on and worked on was so generous.

On Christmas Eve, as his wife worked so hard in the kitchen to put a feast of wild partridge and old potatoes on the table for them, he snuck out of the house, grabbed his ax from the barn and headed into the wood. He knew he couldn’t go against the lord’s wishes, but he also knew that no one would miss the skinny, bent jack pine on the edge of the forest.

He chopped it down and took it home. The farmer’s wife decorated it with scraps of ribbon and stars cut from old newsprint. The jack pine was the happiest tree ever.

Shortly after Christmas, the farmer took the little pine out to the wood pile. As winter descended and cold gripped the young couple, each night the farmer would bring in an armful of hard wood from the pile, overlooking the scrubby pine.

One morning, when the farmer’s wife was nearly ready to deliver, the farmer looked around the small house and realized that there was no cradle for the baby. His wife told him that they would manage without one, that they didn’t need the luxury of a bed for their child. The farmer however went out to the wood pile to see what he could find.

All of the hard wood was too valuable; it was already dried and would make the warmest fires as cold winter nights dragged on. Finally he spotted the scraggly used Christmas tree. He immediately started to work on the cradle.

The jack pine couldn’t believe it. Not only had he gotten to be the Christmas tree in their house, but now he would hold their precious baby.

Christmas Stockings

The house I grew up in didn’t have a fireplace. We tried to hang our Christmas stockings above the vent which shot the heat into the living room from the woodstove in the basement. But Mom took them down, claiming that we would start a fire with that kind of shenanigans. Instead we had to hang our stockings on the built-in bookcase in the little alcove outside the bedrooms.

When I moved my own family into our house in 1990, I was so excited that now we had a fireplace and could have a place to hang the kids’ stockings. Over the years, I got a little carried away with the stockings. Everyone in the household had to have one, which of course included the pets. Theirs were smaller than the ones belonging to the people in our house, but all stockings had the names inscribed in the white fur trim.

Unfortunately, those pets started dying. And what was I to do with their stockings? A few years ago, I started the memory wall. I know, how Christmasy is that? But if you can’t remember family members who have passed on at Christmas, when can you remember them? And though she hasn’t passed on, our exchange student from Portugal has a stocking on the memory wall too.

Shadow and Pepper were our two cocker spaniels who died within a month of each other in 2007. Pebbles and BamBam were the cats I got from my sister. Keshia (whose sock you can barely see) was the black cat we brought all the way from Colorado. She died in 2004 at the age of 19. And Ines, my Portuguese daughter. Can you believe I never had socks for the two hamsters or the guinea pig?

Christmas Wishes

Sorry that I haven’t remained diligent with my blog this week. I truly had good intentions and was going to stay on schedule. I thought that I had Christmas preparations well in hand, but here I am on Christmas Eve afternoon, not only with gifts still to wrap, but gifts to finish making. (And if I don’t get in the shower pretty soon, I will never be ready for church in time.)

Why do we continually let this blessed holiday get out of control? Why is it so easy to get caught up in the hectic busy-ness of the season and so hard to just focus on what is really important? Family and true friends really don’t expect expensive wrapped presents; they just want our time, our love. They want to know that we are happy and at peace, and in exchange we want peace for them too. We all just want laughter. And for all my family and friends, even those who only know me via this blog, I wish for you the joy in knowing Jesus Christ as your Savior.


My husband has finally learned to tie his own tie.

Christmas Cookies part 2

Like every good American woman, I carried the Christmas cookie tradition into my own household. My rollouts were not nearly as perfect as my mom’s, but the taste was nearly the same. The look? It varied. But every year, early December, I started loading up the freezer with whatever I could bake.

In the fall of 2007, in response to Val’s pleas, we acquired a foreign exchange student from Portugal. Ines (pronounced E-nish) joined our family the day before Thanksgiving. Though she had already been in America for several months, she still had lots to learn about our country and a whole lot to learn about how we did things in my house.

The Christmas cookie baking started the end of November as scheduled. Ines was in awe. She had never baked cookies in her homeland, and apparently no one else did either. She had only ever eaten store-bought cookies in Portugal. That was impossible for me to believe, but c’est la vie. (She also found cupcakes fascinating and couldn’t believe that they were just cake made in

cups.)

The cookies went into the freezer as normal, but Ines couldn’t understand why.

“We save them and bring them out for Christmas.”

“But, why?” That turned out to be her favorite phrase.

December 24 arrived and I went down to the basement to fill a plate of cookies from the freezer. Most of the containers were still pretty full, but I did pull out a large Ziploc bag with only one Peanut Blossom remaining.

“Ines! These cookies were for Christmas!”

Her answer was “But, why?”

I wasn’t really angry, but I always try to learn from my misfortunes. By May I was busy planning the graduation party for both Val and Ines. I wanted to have some chocolate chip cookies on hand, so I baked a batch to put away for Memorial Day weekend. It dawned on me that the freezer wouldn’t be safe, so I hid them in a cabinet in the far corner of the basement.

Sometime, in mid-August, I was going through said cabinet and made a discovery. The chocolate chip cookies which I had hidden and completely forgotten. C’est la vie.

Nick, Ines and Val Christmas Day 2007