Each year, beginning the first week of December, Jilda and I take the time to watch our collection of Christmas movies. Everything from Christmas Vacation to It’s A Wonderful Life.
Last night we watched Christmas Vacation and my favorite scene is when Chevy Chase’s character, Clarke Griswold is watching old 8mm films of his family past Christmases.
My mom had those old films and videos too, I watched them so many times and just like Clarke, they put a smile on my face and a tear in my eyes.
Many folks remember Christmas at my mom and dad’s house. We always had a yard full of decorations that went up the Friday after Thanksgiving. The whole neighborhood got into the exterior illumination frenzy. Sometimes we needed a traffic cop because of all the people driving through to see the Sloss Hollow Lights.
All the kids would remember the memory of mountains of gifts under my mom’s tree. She made sure every one got a gift.
But for me, my favorite memory was mama in the kitchen during the weeks before Christmas. She would spend the month of December making divinity, fudge, pecan pies, and cakes. She made peanut butter candy and sweet potato pies and orange slice cake, and her punch was the stuff legends were made of.
She had old wire-bound notebooks full of handwritten recipes for all her confections. When we would visit mom’s kitchen, Jilda wanted to dive head first on the desert table and eat her way from end to end.
Mama made so much sweet stuff that everybody got rewarded, kids, grandkids, neighbors, and people whose last names started with W.
If you didn’t leave my mom’s house with a sugar buzz, it was no one’s fault but your own. That was mom in her element and all that cooking was not work to her but play.
A few years back mom started having health issues and moved in with my older sister. My sister welcomed our mom into her house and provided her with care that no amount of money could ever buy. I am forever grateful for the kindness and love my sister showed our mom.
Through the years, mom harbored hope that someday she would go back home and spend Christmas as she had before, decorating her yard and cooking up goodies for everyone she knew. Sadly that never happened.
It seems at Christmas the word magic gets used often, here is some magic I would love to see. I’d love to see all my family and friends together in mom’s old house, with mom in the kitchen frosting cakes, cutting chunks of fudge as big as bricks and serving up her Christmas punch.
I would make a movie and call it “Magic in Sloss Hollow”.
Merry Christmas.
