By Diana Clark (Volunteer Facilitator), December 28, 2016 — I am always nostalgic during the holidays. I love to reflect upon my childhood Christmases, remembering the ribbon candy and hard candies in pretty dishes, the maple rock candy animals in my Christmas stocking, along with nuts and tangerines. My parents didn’t decorate until after my brother Eddie and I went to bed on Christmas Eve. In fact, it was Christmas Eve when our dad would drive to Clayton and purchase a fresh cut tree after they had been reduced to $2.00. When we awoke at the crack of dawn, the entire living room was Christmas—the tree with multi-colored lights and lots of tinsel, the white linen table runners with pretty embroidered poinsettias, stockings hung on the decorated mantle of the (fake) fireplace, and the smell of bayberry candles placed in holes that had been drilled into a birch log that was adorned with fresh greens and holly—a yule log. As a child, it was magical. It was a tradition I wanted to continue.
Early in our marriage, George and I moved from a tiny one bedroom apartment into an upstairs, two-bedroom apartment in a private home in Mullica Hill, along with our first child, Diana Lee, who was about two years old at the time. Space was no longer an issue—the rooms, very big and the ceilings, high. We even had use of the attic accessed through a door and up a regular staircase. It was in the attic that George refurbished an old tricycle for Diana Lee that Christmas. Each night after Diana was in bed, he would climb the stairs and go about his labor of love. Under the tree Christmas morning was the most beautiful, shiny, red tricycle to rival any flimsy, store-bought trike of the time. (I’ve often wondered what Santa thought when he saw that tricycle!)
When son Doug was born, we lived in our own three-bedroom home. I tried to carry on the tradition of decorating Christmas Eve and having our children awake to “everything Christmas,” but it wasn’t practical. Christmas decorating had become far more elaborate by then. I began decorating right after Thanksgiving when George and Doug were in Maine hunting. He and Doug would come home to “everything Christmas,” except for the tree; we would still wait for Christmas Eve to decorate the live tree. George would shop around for the right tree, with the right size ball to ensure it had sufficient roots to live on after he planted it on the perimeter of our property. George and the children would carefully adorn the tree with the priceless ornaments we acquired throughout the years—they told our story in part.
It seems that life happens in stages, and each stage holds joy and sadness, as if on a balance scale, teetering between good and bad—sometimes more joy and sometimes more sadness. Looking back, it seems as though the scale was always heavy with joy as a child at Christmas and then again as a young parent at Christmas. Sadly my scale tipped toward sadness for a time; but then I realized that my attitude controls the scale. The trappings and trimmings of Christmas (or the lack thereof) are no longer my focus. The true Joy of Christmas—the Birth of Jesus Christ— outweighs any sadness.