Murder She Writes

To borrow Jen’s note from Monday:

For the next two weeks, Murder She Writes will be bringing you our favorite blogs from the past. Then on Monday, January 4th, 2010, we’ll begin a new year with new blogs! This blog below was one of my favorites probably because it was just so much fun to write.

Oh and although the blogs are repeats, we will try to be around for comments. Let’s face it, we have to check in or we’d miss you all too much!

TRADITIONS…

When I was five, my grandparents came to visit for Christmas, which meant they would be there on Christmas morning to open presents. This sounded like an utterly excellent idea because two more people probably meant at least one more present for me. Seriously, that was the whole point, right? I wasn’t sure how Christmas could be better, because I was pretty certain that Santa was bringing me my heart’s desire:

Oh, I so wanted that sucker. I think every third word out of my mouth had been Easy Bake Oven. For months. How my mother did not kill me and stuff me into pie I do not know. Seriously, I want to go back and tell that little kid that in the future, she was going to reference the kitchen as that big vague area with the refrigerator that holds the diet cokes so SAVE HER BREATH and ask for a toy typewriter. She is never going to bake cakes and pies and if she does, they are going to taste suspiciously like the mud that she used in the recipe for the Easy Bake Oven Chocolate Cake because she ran out of cake mix and mud was sort of the same color so it was the SAME THING, RIGHT? Oh, how I could save that little girl a lot of disappointment.

Anyway, even at five, I was dimly aware that my grandparents were slightly grumpy. [I think the expression "mean as a snake" had been used once in reference to my paw paw, but the Snake Union petitioned for a cease and desist on the grounds that it was slanderous and won.] It didn’t matter, though, because for starters, I pretty much hung the moon as far as my grandparents were concerned, and in my spare time, had tossed out a few stars. And it was Christmas. How on earth could anyone anywhere on the planet not be joyous because I was about to get presents?

Our family had the tradition that you were not allowed to open anything on Christmas Eve. I think somewhere around this point my parents caved and would allow ONE and only ONE present to be opened. I secretly think they had a betting pool going with the neighbors to see how many minutes of indecision it would take for me to pick out a present before my head exploded all over the tree.

I have no memory of whatever it was that I got that night because that night was the night before the Easy Bake Oven and the next morning was going to be the morning of the Easy Bake Oven. I could not fall asleep (I think we were made to go to bed around eight) and I was awake for hours counting down to the time that the house was quiet enough for me to hear if Santa came. And then I could hear him. Finally. But I knew that I was not allowed to get up to peek and believe me, I was not about to piss off the man who was bringing me the EASY BAKE OVEN OF HEAVEN, FOREVER AND EVER AMEN. So I stayed in bed and waited and waited and waited and the house was hushed and the crickets chirped their stupid cricket song that basically meant it was still nighttime and I was two rooms away from the Easy Bake Oven and it was KILLING ME.

I waited as long as I could. As. Long. As. I. Could. I think it was somewhere around four in the morning when I deemed it safe to slip out of bed because see, I had done that the year before–slipped out of bed early and gone in and played with my presents for a couple of hours in the OHMYGODIT’SEARLY o’clock that my parents typically awoke for, but I would studiously avoid every single year except on that one day. I crept along the hallway and went through the dining room, tiptoeing into the dark living room.

Now, I have incredible night vision, and practically have cat eyes–I could see the tree and all the presents Santa had laid out and there was no Easy Bake Oven. At least, not out in the center of the room in front of the tree, but I was not to be deterred, I knew that it was there, somewhere, it was calling to me, and I eased around presents and wove silently between packages until I was at the far side of the tree, and LO, IT WAS THERE. My little brother Mike had followed me in (but not before I had made it crystal freaking clear that he better not make a SINGLE SOLITARY SOUND that woke up our parents and ruined our early morning adventure, thus depriving me of the Easy Bake Oven or else he would DIE before he got to play with a single present and I was not kidding. That was the quietest that kid has ever been, to this day.)

But I don’t think I noticed because the Holy Grail of all Christmas presents was before me, and not even still stuck in the box–it was sitting out in all its glory where I could touch it. I quietly opened the little oven doors and moved around some of the cooking tins and I think I held my breath ’til I was completely lightheaded. The sheer awesomeness of its teal beauty made me want to weep with joy. It was bigger and better than I had imagined all of those times I had pointed to it in the catalog or on the TV commercial and it had a REAL stove top that was SHINY and from about two feet away, a deep male voice boomed, “WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING IN HERE?”

I think I went through the tree, I left that room so fast. I’m 99% sure I trampled my little brother and knocked him unconscious and my footprints were on the tops of packages and the side of the wall and a couple of lampshades five feet off the ground. I made the land speed record getting back to my room and under my bed, in the far corner, with about three hundred stuffed animals in front of me to block the way of EVIL SANTA who clearly not only really sees you when you’re sleeping, but really freaking did know when you were awake.

It took them a couple of hours to find me.

It did not compute for half of the day that the voice had belonged to my paw paw, who’d been sound asleep on the sofa next to the tree until he suddenly awoke to noises in the room and thought someone was inside the house, stealing the presents, because he couldn’t actually see me in the dark on the other side of the Christmas tree, little as I was, hunkered down next to the Easy Bake Oven. It probably didn’t help me believe his tale of totally innocently scaring the living bejesus out of me because he laughed so hard, he had to keep wiping tears from his eyes as he re-told how I’d gone over objects as tall as his head to get out of that room.

Yesterday, my granddaughter Angie was zooming along the house–she’s fourteen months old and adorable and fascinated with the Christmas tree, but not entirely aware of what all of this is about yet, and it dawned on me that not too long from now, she is going to be five and she’s going to bug the living crap out of her parents for something and she’s going to probably take after me and tiptoe into the room in the wee hours of the morning to see what Santa brought her and I cannot tell you how much I will be tempted  to find an excuse to spend the night on their sofa and pass down my paw paw’s tradition. Because if I get to see her plow over their tree and any potential siblings? Even if I have to pay for therapy for the next twenty years, it would be totally worth it.

(Kidding.) (Sort of.)

I can tell you this–I remember that Christmas with a crystalline clarity and I have no clue what the Christmases afterward were like, nor who visited.

So tell me about some of your crazy or not-so-crazy family traditions around this holiday season or what toy could you just not live without.

And here’s a close-up of a part of my tree… the tree is mostly teddy bears (three sizes, over a hundred bears) and apples and roses and doves (and not a single breakable thing, in case any future kid feels the need to go over the danged thing):

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