The Dynamic Duo

Well, a certain Ultra Son of mine has been giving me a lot of grief about my lack of postings. The trouble is, first of all time…..although he keeps trying to tell me that if I have time to play Bookworm for an hour or more a day that I have time for the Blog…...but that’s mindless, relaxing time, unless the stupid bookworm drops too many red tiles at once. Then it’s pretty stressful. And it may well be that after you decipher this mixed up missive that you will have a strong arguement that in my case blogging is also mindless, and you will be right. So what was I talking about? Oh yeah, why I don’t post…......I forget the second reason; probably laziness. But that brings me to my subject: The Changing Tides of Christmas Time. I just now thought of it, but that’s what I’m going to write about. Yes, I’m sure.
My family of 5 kids and 2 parents lived far from other relatives so we had our own family traditions. In my childhood, Christmas Eve was the time for opening of gifts. We had an early dinner, sometimes at Ralley’s, a grocery store that put out a Christmas eve spread of munchies, most notably cheese and crackers and salami. Later, when they stopped doing it, we got some munchies of our own (most notably cheese, crackers and salami) and Voila! A tradition was born! We do that still, and have ever since the UltraKids were small, esp if a relative sends us Hickory Farms for Christmas, and they usually do. My favorite part was our little Christmas Eve service. My parents got the outline from a church one time; it consists of scripture readings about Jesus’ birth, Christmas carols and lighting of candles. There were certain phrases to say also when candles were lit. My Dad always told us what to say, and chose the lucky child to light each candle. When we ran out of phrases, he made some up so we could all light a candle. BUT, the phrases were lengthy, and we would give out the whole spiel at once. Of course, we would always have to be prompted, with much repeating and trying again, but that was part of the fun. And the tradition. We still do that little service in our family to this day, candle lighting and all, and it continues to be my favorite part. Its nice to get back to the basics and worship God for who he is and what he has done.
After that we opened our gifts from each other in a very certain way. We took turns bringing the gifts to my Dad, who read the tag, and the lucky recipient was then permitted to open it. We took our time, and relished each one and got lots of thanks and appreciation. On Christmas morn, Santa had come in the night, bringing an eclectic array of gifts. We all had to wait in the hallway until my parents were ready to come with us, so we could all enter the living room (site of tree and gifts) at the same time, and they could enjoy the look of rapture and wonderment on our cute little faces. Santa”, as my Dad was known around this time of year, liked to do his shopping at the last possible moment, ususally Christmas Eve morning, and he always found some unusual bargains. One year, I remember we all got huge cutout cardboard standup figures of Popeye, Olive Oil, Wimpy, Sweet Pea, etc. It was great.
We got snow once every 20 years or so in central Calif. Once it snowed near Christmas time and we went out and gathered up every shred of snow in the yard and made this really groovy snowman complete with all the standard snowman accoutrements. By the middle of the afternoon, the hat, scarf and snowman face parts were lying in a melted puddle of snowman in the middle of our back yard.
In John’s family, they just got up whenever they felt like it on Christmas morning, found their presents and opened them whenever they liked! What kind of a tradition is that? But he felt pretty strongly about the Christmas morning thing, so I magnanimously agreed to that, but we kept all of my important traditions.
Anyway,UB keeps nagging me on IM about sending him some pictures…....grumble, grumble. He keeps telling me to post, then won’t leave me alone so I can! Just kidding, Honey.
I have just decided that this post will be a serial. I’m kind of tired of writing just now. That’s the good part about being a popular author. You can be whimsical, quixotic and idiosyncric and everyone just has to take it! So you can look forward to the next installment whenever I feel like writing it! So….......TO BE CONTINUED…...............
As Ever,
UltraMom