The Sunday Memory Drawer - The Crazy, Lazy Days of Christmas.

Okay, last Sunday I wrote about the major Christmas shopping excursions that I used to go on with my mother.  

Lest you think that my entire family was one big Christmas-present-buying-machine, I want to tell you that the big Yuletide gift years did not last long.  Sure, as long as little kids were involved, we were always treated well.  In that respect, we were definitely not the Crachit family.  

But, as time wore on, I started to notice that the gift swaps between all the adult relatives slowed down significantly.  Indeed, at the same age now, my friends and I are eschewing Christmas presents these days as we have all completely run out of nifty gift ideas.  We simply enjoy the season and don't worry about that shirt you just know is one size too small.

That said, I figure my folks should have done the same thing with their contemporaries.  But, instead, they kept giving Christmas gifts.  They just didn't put a lot of thought into it.  And, apparently neither did anybody else.

Take, for instance, a popular gift idea that often was given to my mom...

 

Yep, you want to find a way into Mom's heart.  Twenty packs of cigarettes will do the trick.  It was the gift that kept on giving.  Smoke it in January and you're still hacking in July.  Cigarette companies loved to do this special holiday packaging, as if these boxes were filled with love.  All the smokers in my family traded these cartons with glee and then, later on, with bronchitis.

The menfolk in my tribe, however, had another holiday present in mind...

Liquor.  All dolled up in special gift packages for the holidays.  I actually have some old family photos where one uncle is proudly holding up his bottle of Canadian Club, complete with a frilly bow around its neck.   This present was so highly regarded that it was usually gone by New Year's Eve, if not the conclusion of Christmas Day dinner.

In his later years, my father found an odd way to do Christmas shopping.  Via catalog.

Yep, my dad became a major devotee of Harry and David.  Who?  Well, thanks to the eternal cosmic connection, I know who they are.  Despite the fact that I have never ever ordered anything from Harry and David, I regularly get a catalog from them. Like clockwise, it shows up on December 1, just in time for holiday gift giving.  They sell fruit baskets, meats, candies, and the like. And I know why I get the catalog.

This has my father's heavenly fingerprints all over it.

Because, in the last ten years of his life, he shopped exclusively with this catalog. Not to relatives, but all those other people on the periphery of your life. The mailman. Your doctor. The local bookie. Your friendly neighborhood bartender. I remember one year my house was knee deep in German summer sausages. Because nothing says "Merry Christmas" more than a big hunk of processed meat. Another year, my father ordered nothing but cans of cashew nuts. Thank God nobody on his list suffered from diverticulitis.

Just so you know that the laziness wasn't simply isolated with my parent's generation, the folks one age group above them also took the easy way out with regard to Christmas presents.  My grandparents and their contemporaries really simplified things when it came to gifts for me and my cousins every holiday.

A five-dollar bill slipped into a single white envelope.  Done.

Okay, as I got older, this was a great present.  Cash is always king.  But, my mother's never-ending quest for decorum and courtesy always required me to call each and every one of those folks on the phone for a personal thank you. 

Not as easy as it sounds when it came to my grandmother's sister-in-law, Tante Emma. 

I'd dread making this call.  All Christmas week, I would hear my mother.

"Call Tante Emma and thank her."

Yeah, yeah.

Another day...

"Call Tante Emma and thank her."

Groan.

Once I got around to the telephone call, it always sounded like this.

Me:  "Hello, Tante Emma.  Thank you for the five dollars."

Tante Emma:  "Hello, sweetheart.  Merry Christmas.  Did you get my envelope?"

Me:  "Yes, I did.  Thank you for the five dollars."

Tante Emma:  "Did you get the five dollars?"

Me:  "Yes.  Thank you very much."

Tante Emma:  "Buy something nice for yourself."

Me:  "I will."

Tante Emma:  "What, sweetheart?"

Me:  "I will."

Tante Emma:  "Will you buy yourself a nice toy?"

Me:  "Yes."

Tante Emma:  "What, sweetheart?"

Me:  "YES, I WILL!!!!!"

Every Christmas, this chestnut unfolded verbatim just like "The Night Before Christmas."  A simple thank you took almost an hour before I got to hand the phone over to my mother.

Now, there were two years where my mom got heavily involved in arts and crafts.  For years, she was the one in the family that everybody turned to for colorizing black and white photos.  I kid you not.  She had all these special crayons and there was always a portrait in my house that was half-colored.  Allegedly, Mom was the only one who could do this and it became a bit of a cottage industry.

One Christmas, she devised another concoction.  I have no idea where she came up with this gem, but she learned how to make this huge Christmas decoration which would hang from your ceiling like a chandelier.  And it was, oh, so simple to make.

She'd take about ten or twelve wire coat hangers.  Sorry, Joan Crawford.  Then, with rubber bands, my Mommie Dearest would attach them all together at their base.  So, essentially, the hangers would fan out in sort of a bell shape.

Step two would find Mom in the kitchen spraying them with gold paint.  At any given time one December, we had about a dozen of these contraptions drying in the basement.  She would then fill each of these things halfway with red, green, and white Christmas balls.  On the hooks of the coat hangers, she would hang more of the same balls, alternating between red, green, and white.

Voila.

This became known as "Pat's Christmas Surprise."

Except the surprise didn't last long.  Before we knew it, everybody in the family had one hanging from a ceiling every holiday.  It was as common as a container of milk in your refrigerator.  This wasn't exactly a limited edition item.  By the second Christmas, she probably had made about fifty of these things.

A nice and easy gift idea that never quite made it to the third Christmas.  You see, rubber bands that have been spray painted tend to dry out.  One by one, we would get the phone calls into the house.

"Pat, your Christmas ornament collapsed all over my living room floor."

Dinner last night:  Hanger steak with grilled broccolini at E & E Grill House in Manhattan.  A special treat was the appetizer---grilled bacon with red cabbage.