It’s Christmas Time Again

Traditions are hard to come by in my family. When I was young, and most everyone in my family all lived in Washington, we would all go to my great-grandmothers for the day. She’d make tons of food, and we’d have to set up extra folding tables and chairs for everyone to fit. It was an insane amount of people packed inside that house, and me and all my cousins running around. Honestly, those are the best Christmases I can remember, though I haven’t had one like it for at least six years now. It’s not that my Christmases now are bad, it can just be hard to try and replicate thew feeling of being in my grandmother’s house, to me, the safest place in the world, young, and surrounded by family. It was a yearly tradition that we’d go to her house. That everybody would. And it’s one of the things I miss most about my childhood.

Other traditions are hard to commit to for the holiday. Some years my family is visiting our extended family. Sometimes in Washington, sometimes elsewhere, and we’re constantly moving to new states. Traditions in general could be hard to keep. For a while, my brother spent every birthday going to a skating rink, but when we moved to Corpus Christi Texas there wasn’t one to be found there, and the tradition died. This is, unfortunately, true for a lot of traditions of ours. There have been years that we’ve spent holidays at a Coast Guard station because my father had to work. One thing we try to do every year is go out and see a movie on Christmas day. We’ve certainly missed years, but it’s something to do all together, and it’s usually what we end up doing. Traditions only involving us and our house, what we can control, is easier. We like to say that it’s tradition to set the Christmas tree up on December 2nd, my mom’s birthday, but I don’t honestly think we do it on that day often enough to be true. When we do though, my mother makes a habit of hanging up not only her nice, store-bought ornaments but also the ones we made her as a child. And then she’ll pull out my “Baby’s first Christmas” ornament and explain that it’s blue instead of pink because she had been so sure that someone would get me one for Christmas, that she wouldn’t need to. Funnily enough, nobody did give me one, and after Christmas, when she went to the store to get one, all they had left was blue.

^ My Cousin Aundre & I on Christmas

I will say that I pretty much always knew that it was my mother, and then my parents, who got me my Christmas gifts, and not Santa. For my mom, who worked hard for the gifts, especially for several years as a single mom, it was hard for her to say that “Santa” gave me all the things she worked so hard to give to me, the way she wasn’t always able to receive as a kid. One thing I will say about Christmas, is that while Santa can be a nice figure, there’s definitely a divide in the kids who believed in Santa, and the kids who knew what their parents went through to get those presents for them, and it’s safe to say that they had pretty different life experiences, not that either are better than the other. I do think that kids should know how much their parents care and provide for them, and that extends to Christmas, knowing that “Santa” didn’t give the gifts, but the parents did.

Even though we don’t have many traditions for Christmas day, I really am thankful for it. My parents do so much to make the day as special as they can. I know I’m lucky. There was never a year where they didn’t try their best, and they always gave all of their kid’s nice gifts, even though money is tight in our family. I know how different other people’s Christmases can be, from extremely glamorous to one that’s more challenging than fun. I know my mother probably tries so hard at Christmas because her own childhood was so hard. She was a child of divorce, who spent most of the time living with her mother, who never had enough money for her kids, despite working as much as she could. Her Christmas years as a child were spent as a child receiving donation gifts from Churches, and although she never blamed her own mother for that, it’s why she works so hard so that she can afford to give me, and my siblings nicer items come Christmas herself. I did like the Santa Claus do you Ever Come to the Ghetto video. I’m, admittedly, not a fan of reggae music, and this was obviously as reggae group, but I did like their message. Living in poverty can be hard and take an extreme toll on people, and fighting just to be alive isn’t exactly stress free, even around Christmas.