My dad's Christmas memories

I found a long-forgotten project on my computer the other day, a collection of "family lore" surrounding the Christmas holidays that I pulled from my own blog and from the blog Reid used to keep and from my mom's blog. I had some good stories. Some touching stories. Some funny stories. Some this-is-how-things-were stories. But I'm missing several perspectives. 

Tonight when I was talking to my parents, I asked my dad to share some Christmas memories from his childhood. Some of them I actually remember hearing, now that he reminded me of them. I'm going to write down what I remember of our conversation here.

First, you should know that my dad has five brothers (and a sister). You should know that the first handful of boys came one after the other—boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. Like firecrackers.

Here's a little scrapbook page of the oldest four (for some reason I have it in my mind that this was my Grandpa's scrapbook):

Here are my grandparents with those same oldest four (my dad is the baby):

And here's just my grandpa this time (again with those four boys—my dad is the baby):

Bob, Ken, Chuck, Bruce...and after my dad came Kevin. 

All those babies grew up to be...a real handful. It was lucky for my grandma that she finally got a girl—my Aunt Tami. Here they are posing for a picture for a news story about all those many big brothers helping their little sister get ready for her first day of kindergarten. As you can see from their glances that they were prone to be troublemakers a little bit, I think:

And here they all are with (surprise!) little Uncle Cory:

Now, to bring us back to Christmas I offer you this shot of my grandma with a Christmas tree behind her. This was taken prior to her getting married, I think, so probably in the 1940s. 

Anyway, the first thing my dad mentioned about Christmas was bowling (and I remember going to the bowling alley around Christmas a few times growing up, myself). He remembers going to the bowling alley on Christmas Eve, having pizza, and playing a few games of bowling before heading home to bed. 

The kids were all put to bed in the basement so that my grandparents could work their Christmas magic upstairs. Those children were notorious for sneaking upstairs to peek at their Christmas presents before my grandparents were ready to be up in the morning so one year my grandpa thought he would outsmart those kids and he went to sleep lying across the top of the stairs. 

Completely undeterred, those boys—one by one—carefully climbed over their dad so they could go poke around under the tree. And then tag-along Tami had to go and spoil it for everybody by tripping and landing right on Grandpa's snoozing belly. 

I can only imagine what a wake-up call that must have been!

("We got in trouble for that," my dad quipped).

*****

He also told me about one year when they had a tree that just wouldn't stay up...because some curious little boys kept trying to climb it. 

My grandma kept trying all sorts of things to keep it upright. She placed it in a 5-gallon bucket filled with sand, she tied it to the curtain rod. Nothing seemed to work. 

"She'd walk into the room and there would be all her little boys just staring at the tree," my dad chuckled. "We didn't have a cat who'd climb it. We didn't have a dog to knock it over."

"So it was you all along?" I asked. 

"Of course it was! But we would stand there, like, 'I don't know what happened!'"

"And I'm sure she believed you..." I mused.

"We got in trouble that year, too," my dad quipped.

*****

My dad remembers going "Christmas Light Looking." With so many kids on a tight budget they looked for inexpensive family things to do. It's a tradition he carried on with his own too-many-kids-on-a-tight-budget family and, honestly...same. I like to take my too-many-kids on a budget-friendly excursions to see lights around the town.

One day in December my grandma had a bunch of boys in the car and she saw a neighbour stringing up some Christmas lights.

"Looks like Christmas is right around the corner," she remarked.

They drove around and did whatever errand it was they needed to do and on the way home one of my uncles begged her to turn (by the neighbour's house) instead of heading straight home. When she asked why they were so adamant that she turn instead of proceeding home, he told her it was because she'd said that Christmas was around that corner!

*****

I asked my parents about the story of my older sisters finding the stash of Christmas presents early. 

Apparently when my dad found out he just carried everything out into the middle of the living room and dropped it, announcing, "Here's Christmas."

He was so mad.

"And hurt," he said. 

Perhaps more hurt than mad. 

I think, with my dad, that anger masked a lot of his deeper emotions.

My mom wishes it could have been handled differently—because it can still feel fun and special to unwrap gifts, even if you know what they are. But that wasn't to be. 

And as my dad pointed out, "It never happened again."

That he knows of, anyway. Maybe they just got sneakier. 

I know that I never went looking for presents as a kid because I lived in mortal dread of "ruining" Christmas because of this story. I used to like to hide in my parents' closet. Not for any particular reason, really, but just to sit in the dark, between the folds of fabric, where everything was muffled. 

I was a weird kid. It's fine.

Anyway, I would not hide in their closet around Christmastime for fear of finding out about presents and ruining everything for everyone. 

*****

I'm sure my parents have other memories about Christmas. My mom has already written a few posts about Christmas on her blog, I know. But mostly about her own childhood, not mine. I wonder what she remembers about Christmas as a young mom...and as a medium mom.