HOLIDAYS
Christmas was also a pretty exciting
time at school as well as at home. In elementary
school we helped decorate the classroom. We made paper chains and ornaments for
the tree, painted holiday figures on the windows, too. We also made presents
for our moms and dads and had to buy a present for the teacher. This was
usually a pin, a scarf, or handkerchiefs.
The next class holiday was Valentine's
Day. We decorated, too, and gave all our classmates cards, and then we
waited to see who we got cards from, looking to see if that Special Someone had
given us one with candies with sayings on them.
Easter we made baskets to take home for
the Easter Bunny to fill.
Thanksgiving we made turkeys.
I think I liked Valentine's Day the
best.
In June, on the last day of school, we
gave the teacher a goodbye gift. This was a little
sad because this was always your favorite teacher of all.
For Halloween we would plan our costumes weeks in advance and plan where we
would trick-or-treat. We knew where the
best candy came from and where the apples and pennies were given, and we would
add up how many houses we had been to and how much time we had left that night
and where we would go.
We would travel as a
group every year. One Halloween when my children were small, nine and seven, I
had one of my migraine headaches, so my cousin Pam, who had children also,
offered to take my two with her. I was ever so grateful for this, and we
still are close, even after all these years.
Thanksgiving,
Christmas, New Year's Day, even Valentine’s Day, when we passed cards to all our classmates, are vivid
memories. We enjoyed Easter for the Easter baskets and later on for the
Easter clothes and the church services, with the church decorated with beautiful
flowers. My mother's favorite flower was the hyacinth. I still think of
her when I smell one.
A snow day wasn't a
real holiday, but we thought it was. No school.
One winter we had a huge storm and school was
closed for three days. We were out at the first sunlight, sleigh riding,
building snow forts, making snow angels, and of course having snowball fights.
We would sleigh ride
on our hill in the yard or we’d go across the street, where there
were two really big hills, and a bunch of kids would be there. It was a
day-long event, and we would be soaked when we came home. Grandma would make us
change our clothes, and she would put them on the radiator to dry.
The next day the
kids would head to the pond to skate, but not me. I was scared to death the ice would crack. One time I went
with Dad up to the woods, to cut down some trees for firewood. He pulled me on
the sled and said he’d go around the pond instead of across, but---no---he didn’t.
He went right across the pond, and he was running, and I was screaming. We made
it. Dad said he was sorry, that he just wanted to show me that it was alright.
New Year's Eves,
Aunt Toddy and Uncle Bill came by, and sometimes
Aunt Jo and Uncle Connie, and of course Grandma Inky would come, and she would
reign over the special New Year's dinner that every year was the same. We
looked forward to the dinner, and probably to the company as well.
One visit, on
Easter, we had a blizzard. They had brought our cousin
Conrad with them, and that didn't happen too often. They got stuck at our house
for three days. He wasn't too happy about this. On another trip poor Uncle
Connie got an ear infection and he couldn't drive for a week. They were stuck:
Aunt Jo had never learned to drive.
When they came up in
the summer, we always had a picnic: hot dogs,
hamburgers, chicken. There's a movie that Uncle Connie took, as he always had
the movie camera with him: in the movie, Mommy is putting steaks on the grill.
Whenever we viewed the film, we always laughed, claiming the steaks were only
for the film and then put back in the freezer.
Speaking of meat and
the freezer, Mommy would over-buy meat for the
freezer since she worked in the meat department, but she never rotated the
other meats from the back to the front, so Vivian's big dogs would get all the
freezer-burned meat, and Daddy would get so mad, telling Mom she was not saving
any money if she was throwing the meat away.
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We are serializing here the upbeat memoir by Kathleen Blake Shields, Home is Where the Story Begins: Memoir of a Happy Childhood, published last fall by Outskirts Press and available from OP and on-line booksellers like amazon.com and bn.com in ebook and paperback format.
I am proud to have coached and edited for Kathy. My site is http://WriteYourBookWithMe.com.
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