Thank you all for coming along on my trip down memory lane.

The Christmas Eve in the photo above was, as near as I can tell, 37 years ago. (Thirty-freakin’-seven, y’all.)

I’m on the left - wearing my red polyester hip huggers, my red/white/blue checked bodysuit, and some sort of monstrosity of a hairstyle that could have ONLY come from my mother’s attempt to curl my hair into something.

Then there’s The Golden Child. He would have been six or so. Are you loving those brown cords and the marled turtleneck sweater?

My Mom - looking adoringly at The Golden Child is wearing a blue print mini dress. White collar and cuffs being the rage that year.

And then, my Sister - at 2. Wearing…red polyester hip huggers and a red/white/blue checked bodysuit.

Do I know why we’re all making those faces? No - that particular memory has been lost to the (37!) years that have passed. But, oh mah holy hell, I remember how much I ADORED that outfit.

—- Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, Seasons Greetings, Happy Holidays and God Bless Us All, Everyone. —-

Christmas Eve - the best freakin’ day of the whole year. Preparations started as soon as we woke up in the morning. Baths. “No, don’t get messy…just sit down and watch television.” Hair curling. “Ow! Mom. Stop. I hate those curlers. Ow! Don’t pull my hair!” Then, sitting under the dryer. With a plastic hood. “MOMMMMMMM! It’s burning. My head is burning!!!”

Finally, we were ready to get dressed. (Oh, are you in for a treat with tomorrow’s photo…) Up until the time I was in High School, my mother insisted on dressing me and my sister exactly alike. Sometimes, if we were lucky, we got different colors. Not always.

When we were ready, and if Dad was home (cops don’t get Christmas off, y’know), we got to open ONE present. Usually, it was something to go with our new outfits - like the Cinderella watch with the pink leather band from one year.

Then, we’d leave for Gramma’s house. My Slovak Grandmother - my Mom’s mom - to meet up with the aunts and uncles and the cousins. There were 17 cousins - we averaged one per year…the oldest was born in 1953, the youngest in 1970. Christmas Eve was the only time we were all together in the same place at the same time. It could get loud. Snort.

Gramma’s menu never changed.

• Oplatky. We each got one wafer to share with everyone else. We’d walk around kissing each other, breaking off pieces of the wafer to give out while saying Merry Christmas. I always tried to get to everyone except the yucky uncle first so that when I got to him, my oplatky was gone.
• Borscht. We were required to have a bowl of borscht. It was a law. With a dollop of mashed potatoes in the middle. And a spoonful of mushrooms added in. No borscht = no presents. Period. Stop complaining.
• Pierogis. Either potato & cheese or sauerkraut. The kids stuck with the potato & cheese. Swimming in butter. Sigh. and Yum.
• Cabbage. With noodles and lots of brown sugar. (Mr. Hot and I ate a lot of this while we were dirt poor students.)
• Baked Cod. Even though tradition says it should be carp, we had cod.

For dessert, there was Kolach and coffee (or Crown Royal) for the adults. The kids were more interested in getting down to the basement - because the sooner the adults were done, the sooner OH MAH HOLY HELL SANTA CLAUS would get there.

Time draggggggggged on after that dinner. We had to try to entertain ourselves, we couldn’t interrupt the adults, we had to BE GOOD. I don’t remember exactly what we did, but with 17 kids, groups surely formed. There were four of us girls that were within 18 months of each other. I imagine we pulled down Gramma’s old McCall’s that were stashed away in the cabinets. Sometimes we’d all dance around the two support poles in the middle of the room.

I can’t imagine that the adults allowed us to stay down there by ourselves for more than 30 minutes or so, or someone would have likely died, but it seemed to take for-freakin’-ever.

Eventually, some Aunt or other would come down…and then another and another. And then the uncles. And then Gramma herself. She would sit in her favorite chair - and gather us all around. We’d sit on the tiled floor. Silent. Listening. Until…

“Shhhhhhhhhhhhhh”, she would say. “You want to be able to hear him coming.”

And then, finally, he would. He’d come down the stairs - if there was snow on the ground, he’d be shaking snow from his boots - carrying a huge bag. And he’d sit on the couch across the room from where we all huddled on the floor, and ask us if we’d been good.

The younger kids’ eyes got wide as they nodded their heads - too awestruck to speak. Us “old timers” grinned and shouted, “Yes!”. Santa would reach into his bag and pull out a package. “Susie!”, he’d call. “Come sit on my lap and get a present.” And so on. “Margie!” “Bobby!” “Michael!” All the way through all seventeen cousins. FOUR times, y’all, once for each aunt/uncle couple. And then, we’d get an envelope with a candy cane taped to it - $5 from Gramma - to get whatever we wanted.

After Santa’s duties were over, he’d “Ho Ho Ho” his way back up the stairs - and the uncle who had been holding the reindeer (because, y’know, someone had to hold those things) would join us in the basement. Our parents would pack up all of our gifts - and those Catholics in the family (um, rarely us, obviously) - would head over to Midnight Mass. We would go home to dream of sugar plums.

Christmas Day was fun, but nothing, NOTHING, could ever compare with those magical Christmas Eves with Gramma and Santa.

—- I wish I could identify the uncle in the picture above, but I can’t. I can’t enlarge the eyes enough to see which of my mother’s brothers was being crushed by Gramma that particular year. The best one, though, was when my Dad…the brown eyed Lebanese guy…got roped into playing Santa. That’s one picture I wish I could dig up. —-

Shut up about the glasses already. It was Nineteen-freakin’-ninety-one. They didn’t make them smaller. And yes, Mr. Hot and I had nearly the same frames. Shush.

Annnywayyyyyy, Shortman was 2 months, 11 days old on Christmas Day. We were still living in West-by-gawd-Virginia, finishing up our degrees at Marshall. We were poor. Dirt poor. Any and all money we had was going towards child support for the Diva and his sister, rent, food and diapers. We managed to scrape together a few dollars for presents for them, but there was nothing for Shortman (not that he would have known anyway) - and certainly no gifts between us - or for any other family members.

The settlement I’d received from Practice went to tuition and books. The only income we had was from Mr. Hot’s motor route - delivering newspapers at 2 am in hilly WV neighborhoods. As an independent contractor, the money he collected from customers was used to pay for the newspapers delivered, social security and income taxes, all maintenance/gas/insurance on the car. That car was our lifeline - if it broke down, we’d have to use rent money to fix it. And then? It would then become our home.

There were no days off. Sick? Head out anyway - hiring a substitute driver meant paying that driver out of meager profits.

I was lucky that I delivered Shortman at 9 pm. If he’d have refused to make an appearance, it would have been a difficult decision to make: Have my husband see his son being born or send him out to deliver those papers so we could afford to have baloney sandwiches for lunch and cabbage for dinner.

Have I set the scene? No money and complete dependence on our only vehicle. Add that to the fact that his family was not speaking to me because, y’know, I was “the other woman” - and it all made Christmas 1991 look pretty freakin’ bleak.

So, the day Mr. Hot came home and said, “Call your Dad. We’re going to surprise your Mom on Christmas Day.”, I had all kinds of questions. How? When? Where are we going to get money for gas? My parents were over 300 miles away - it was a 6 1/2 hour trip in good weather - it was all kinds of unnecessary miles added to our already high mileage vehicle.

He looked at me and said, “We’re going. The Christmas Eve papers are always early. I’ll finish as fast as I can and we’ll get on the road. Driving in the middle of the night, we’ll get there early…we’ll spend the day, but we’ll need to leave around dinner time to make it back so I can do the route Christmas night.”

I realized that he was giving me the only Christmas gift we could come close to affording - taking our son to see my parents. (He was also securing his place as my mother’s favorite son-in-law…but we didn’t know it at the time. Snirk.)

He kissed me awake when he got back and 30 minutes later we were on our way. We pulled into the driveway and unpacked Shortman from his car seat. Dad met us at the back door. “Your mom is in the bathroom. She just got out of the shower.” He took the baby from my arms and beckoned me to follow.

He knocked on the bathroom door and said, “Hey. You have a package waiting for you out here.” The door cracked open and Mom looked out. “Whose baby is that?”, she asked, before noticing me standing there. “Merry Christmas!,” I laughed.

Dad handed her her grandson and I grabbed my Santa/husband by the hand, and led him upstairs for a nap. (No, really. We’d been awake all night y’all.)

That photo up there? In MomandDad’s kitchen on that Christmas morning. I have no idea if it was before or after the nap - but by 6 p.m. we were headed back south. I drove so Mr. Hot could try to catch some sleep before heading back out on the road.

—- The next year, we’d both finished our degrees and had moved back to Michigan. We had jobs that we worked in the daylight AND that same car. —-

Yes, this is the same kid as here. Can’t tell by the hair, can you? Apparently he was waiting for the flash to blind him.

I’m not going to spend a lot of time on stories to go along with this one since I want to share these links with you.

• Please go check out Lys’s Cooking in Stilettos site for a change to win great prizes AND help others.
• Magpie’s link to Knit One, Save One - help babies by knitting or crocheting a cap to help keep babies warm.
• Are you looking for a way to get your kid interested in reading? Major Bedhead reviews “Read, Kiddo, Read” for MotherTalk - and I wish it had been around when I was trying to get that kid up there to love reading as much as his dad and I do.
• Go see Mom-101 and take action. Click through on her site or on this cute little button.

—- Now, if you’ll excuse me, I hear a hot shower calling my name. —-

When Mr. Hot and I moved to Michigan in August 1992, we lived with my parents for fucking ever for 4 months - until we had landed jobs and could afford the security deposit on an apartment.

Thanksgiving weekend, we moved to a 2nd floor apartment - the three of us - midway between my job and Mr. Hot’s. I drove 30 miles to the southeast. He drove 30 miles to the northwest. It sucked with much suckage.

Then, just as our lease was coming up, he found a new job and I went through my first corporate buyout in Michigan. (There were four more in my future…) As luck would have it, though, our new jobs were within 5 miles of each other! So we moved to Royal Oak.

We stayed in our first Royal Oak apartment from November 2003 through February 2002. I know! Shortman had just turned two when we moved in. He was in Middle School when we moved out.

The whole time we were in that apartment, though, we had our eyes on a townhouse at the end of the street. People moved into those townhouses and never left, it seemed. They were over 1000 sq. feet, with a full basement (we could have a washer and dryer!) - wood floors and a backyard patio. There was room to eat IN the kitchen.

Finally…a unit opened up. It was even a corner unit! We saw the For Rent sign and RAN down the street to see it. It was so much more expensive than our little place, but we filled out the application and crossed our fingers. All of those years of trying, desperately, to fix our credit reports (Two divorces, y’all. It wasn’t pretty.) - living with people above us (including someone who enjoyed vacuuming wood floors at 2 a.m.!) - and feeling increasingly crowded - might finally be coming to an end.

Once we found out we’d been approved, we begged out of our lease early. The apartment manager was lenient since we’d filed multiple complaints about the the cellist who was the current resident over our heads. She practiced all day (including weekly quartet practices) and had two cats that chased each other (on wood floors) all night.

Packing up and hiring a moving van took a couple of weeks, but, on the last day of February, 2002, we moved our little family from the north end of Mansfield Avenue to the south end. The movers were amused. When they showed up and said, “Okay, where are we headed?”, we pointed to the corner and said, “Down there.”

Oh mah holy hell. I loved that house. Shortman’s bedroom had twice as much room. We had two toilets! No more scrounging quarters for the washing machine. The kitchen windows overlooked the backyard patio - where we watched the sunset every evening. We even had a carport.

Best of all was our bedroom. Two floor to ceiling windows faced the east - the morning sun was beautiful coming in those windows and shining on the oak floors. The walls were bright white - we added white blinds and decorated in shades of white, taupe, lilac and green.

We made plans to add a wall to separate the basement laundry room from an ‘office/family room’ area. Our next door neighbor (with whom we shared a single wall), was a retired gentleman who watched the evening news with a Jack & Coke - then he went to bed. No loud music. No cats running over our heads.

It was heaven.

That picture up there is from that townhouse. Christmas Day was five days after we’d found out that the townhouses had been sold and were being turned into condominiums. Yes - we’d lived our dream for less than 10 months. We had until New Year’s Day to decide whether we were going to buy our unit or move. If we didn’t buy, we had 90 days (or until our lease was up, whichever was sooner) to move out.

The developer was an asshole of the first degree. The price on that condo was more than the much newer three-bedroom units around the corner had been two years before - but such was the housing market in 2002. Properties were getting snapped up as soon as the For Sale sign got planted in the yard. Oh, and according to the purchase agreement, we would be responsible for any structural issues that were found - since there hadn’t been any condo fees accumulating. Things like the new roof that was likely needed. And the conversion to individual electric meters.

That Christmas up there? The only one we spent in that townhouse. When our lease was up, we moved again. We did end up with the Worlds Greatest Next Door Neighbors, so it wasn’t totally bad. But I still miss those windows in my bedroom.

—- In addition to the XBox game he’s holding, Santa also brought a bunch of G.I. Joe paraphernalia, Backyard Hockey for the computer, and a new desk lamp. —-