3(1) days of sharing, day 23: a christmas memory.
Can't think of a single story, so a paragraph on childhood Christmases past:
I'm born on Christmas Day, so it's always been my birthday. We never had santa in our house, except when we were at my maternal grandparents' house. My father didn't believe in it. We were told, rather solemnly, before we could talk, that Christmas was a celebration of the birthday of Jesus, that dude who died for all our sins so we would go to heaven, and Santa wasn't real. So in my first year of school, I happily passed this information on to my classmates. I think some of them probably cried.
Anyway.
There's never been any tradition: birthday presents first or Christmas presents first, except that we always had to wait until after Christmas mass to open our presents. Thankfully, by the time we were 10, my parents had started taking us to Christmas Eve mass. Woe was the Christmas morning when you had to go to 10am mass at the Cathedral (St Monica's). The bishop said mass at the Cathedral and he talks slow. And I mean slow. He could make a 2 hour service last 4 hours on pauses alone. (He said my confirmation mass, which actually, was mercifully short). The Cathedral though, was more beautiful. There were huge stained glass windows lining all the walls. No air-conditioning though, which in the Tropics, in summer, is a big deal. Still, the ceiling was more interesting. Ply-wood tile things with tiny little holes, which I always wondered about. How did they get there? Why was it made out of that material?
I remember my sixth birthday. I don't remember mass. But I remember the entire family was at our place for Christmas, aunts and uncles and cousins and both sets of grandparents. Anyway. I had just been given a Baby Born doll, my cherished toy doll, which still lives in the cupboard above the stairs in our house today. It was raining, bucketing down, in the way only Cairns rain can, so we had to move the celebrations underneath the house (which was an old Queenslander) and the stairs were wet so we were told to be careful, darting in and out underneath plates of food and people's legs. I had candles in the Christmas cake that I got to blow out. There's a photo of me, doll in hand, blowing out the candles on the cake that had one of those plastic Merry Christmas signs, gold cursive, stuck in fondant icing that I hated. Luckily, I always liked fruit cake. I used to peel off the icing and give it to my sister, who didn't like the cake.
Rest of meme here.
I'm born on Christmas Day, so it's always been my birthday. We never had santa in our house, except when we were at my maternal grandparents' house. My father didn't believe in it. We were told, rather solemnly, before we could talk, that Christmas was a celebration of the birthday of Jesus, that dude who died for all our sins so we would go to heaven, and Santa wasn't real. So in my first year of school, I happily passed this information on to my classmates. I think some of them probably cried.
Anyway.
There's never been any tradition: birthday presents first or Christmas presents first, except that we always had to wait until after Christmas mass to open our presents. Thankfully, by the time we were 10, my parents had started taking us to Christmas Eve mass. Woe was the Christmas morning when you had to go to 10am mass at the Cathedral (St Monica's). The bishop said mass at the Cathedral and he talks slow. And I mean slow. He could make a 2 hour service last 4 hours on pauses alone. (He said my confirmation mass, which actually, was mercifully short). The Cathedral though, was more beautiful. There were huge stained glass windows lining all the walls. No air-conditioning though, which in the Tropics, in summer, is a big deal. Still, the ceiling was more interesting. Ply-wood tile things with tiny little holes, which I always wondered about. How did they get there? Why was it made out of that material?
I remember my sixth birthday. I don't remember mass. But I remember the entire family was at our place for Christmas, aunts and uncles and cousins and both sets of grandparents. Anyway. I had just been given a Baby Born doll, my cherished toy doll, which still lives in the cupboard above the stairs in our house today. It was raining, bucketing down, in the way only Cairns rain can, so we had to move the celebrations underneath the house (which was an old Queenslander) and the stairs were wet so we were told to be careful, darting in and out underneath plates of food and people's legs. I had candles in the Christmas cake that I got to blow out. There's a photo of me, doll in hand, blowing out the candles on the cake that had one of those plastic Merry Christmas signs, gold cursive, stuck in fondant icing that I hated. Luckily, I always liked fruit cake. I used to peel off the icing and give it to my sister, who didn't like the cake.
Rest of meme here.