Christmas Past

Posted on December 25, 2003 in Childhood College

It rained today. The Los Angeles news said that it had not rained on Christmas Day since 1983. I was in North Carolina. I wracked my brain and tried to remember a Christmas with rain and could not think of one. There were a few Christmases with fog, but no rain.

When I was young, Christmas was a day on which we spent some time outside on the back lawn. The closely-cropped grass was a mix of whited and muted green blades, a coarse as scrub brush hairs. We’d run around, shouting which led to my parents coming out and telling us that if we didn’t stop the lawyer who lived behind us would sue. He never did or threatened to do so when I was in earshot. He was, after all, our family lawyer.

Christmas was a day of subdued blue skies and sometimes a morning fog that rose but didn’t quite clear by early evening, which happened a little after 4:30 PM. On rare occasions, it rained beforehand and then there would be snow on the mountains that we would stand on the front lawn to wonder at. This was our White Christmas. We never went up to see the snow firsthand because we didn’t have chains and, as my mother put it, there were too many yahoos (she pronounced the Swiftian noun “yay-whos”) on the road.

I spent many of my Christmases staring at the distant places I could never get to as a boy. I still seldom visit them.

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Another Christmas that I remember, the one that happened after my father died. By this time we went to Tustin every Christmas to spend the day with my aunt and uncle. My Uncle Henry carved the turkey, detached the “widow’s meat”, and gave it to my mother. A strange, morbid honor, this eating of the diamond shaped flesh.