Ed. — Archived from the Sunday, Dec. 3, print edition.
VIRGINIA BEACH — I love decorating our home and lawn for Christmas, but I don’t love pulling the decorations out of our storage space in a room above the garage.
We have a walk-in attic of sorts, and that would certainly be the better location for the dozen holiday bins and boxes that stay hidden for much of the year. But I’ve opted to keep them in a rather small space with a three-foot access door.
The bins fit perfectly.
Me? Not so much.
Every year I vow to store them elsewhere, but somehow, come January, they go back in this tiny space.
So the time came to retrieve and unpack the bins. I stretched, then twisted and contorted my body to crawl in and pull them all out before hauling them downstairs.
My dad had it so much easier. Back then, he had fewer bins that were conveniently located in a real attic. Dad climbed up the drop-down folding staircase and passed them down to the rest of the family. Then we carried our treasures downstairs without a recuperation period.
What treasures they were. We had a silver aluminum metal tree with the color wheel which reflected different colors on the tree as it slowly spun. This was truly a 1960s thing, as I recall, and we later transitioned to a real-looking tree once the novelty wore off for my sisters and me.
All the ornaments on the tree were glass, and one or two would fall off and shatter every year. Walking barefoot around our tree was seldom safe. Fortunately, Mom was a nurse.
My mother had an affinity for fake snow. We’d buy dozens of cans of the stuff as soon as it hit the shelves. My parents were native New Yorkers, and they yearned for the real snow Norfolk winters did not deliver.
But our house looked like a blizzard had blown through with fake snow on every window, mirror and door.
Fun to look at. Harder to sled on.
Dad was responsible for the outside decorations, mostly hanging colored lights on the gutters with the extension cord running under the garage door to an outlet. The bulbs of yore were easily the size of a large egg and about as brittle. They burned out as though in a race. I think Dad simply left the ladder outside behind a bush to replace bulb after bulb.
I cherish these memories. My favorite Christmas decoration from my youth was our fake fireplace. Our house didn’t have a real one, and Dad came upon a foldable cardboard fireplace. The flame was a small white light bulb behind cardboard and yellow and orange cellophane. A small spinning wheel gave the illusion of flickering flames.
The whole thing was about five feet tall, and it even had a mantle upon which we hung our stockings. Even our pet dog loved it and would sleep in front of it until the year it finally fell apart.
We have a real fireplace now, and we start a fire in it every Christmas Eve. And we have a very nice – and very green – artificial Christmas tree. We have a different type of color wheel which sits in our yard and flashes red and green images on the front of our house.
These will be my daughter’s Christmas memories, and some day, of course, she will make her own with a future family and holiday doodads, whether they are ephemeral or made to last.
She may never experience an aluminum tree nor a fake cardboard fireplace, but these are the decorations surrounding the memories of the people we love.
Some traditions come and go, but new memories join the old ones. We may pack them away in the crawl spaces in our hearts and brains, but they’re just waiting to be pulled out again and enjoyed.
The author, a business coach and consultant, is active in community service and enjoys time with his wife, Kim, and daughter, Kara. Reach him via email at mckco85@aol.com.
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