Christmas is a go-go at our house

Appeared Dec. 11, 2006

The small gathering of 30 in my immediate family is gearing up for another Christmas Eve.
I’m never the host - I put the turkey on the table at Thanksgiving so at Christmas, it’s somebody else’s turn.
The last couple of years, it has been at my youngest brother’s house.
Last year we brought Grammy from the nursing home.
She was a good egg, all right.
We helped her along - one of us at each of her elbows - but she walked up the driveway and took the couple of steps into the house.
We sat her down at the table and got her a plate of food. She ate it all and, while she didn’t participate in the conversation much, she seemed to enjoy herself as she took it all in.
Then we helped her into a reclining chair in the living room.
We made it lean back and covered her up. She was thrilled to see all the little kids jumping around excitedly as they waited for gifts to be handed to them.
Finally all the packages were handed out.
And Gram was asleep.
She slept through the rustling of paper as everyone opened their presents.
She slept through the squealing kids. She slept through the “oohs” and “ahhhs” and the “thank yous.”
This year she’s gone. She died last January.
She’s just a happy memory now like my other grandmother.
My other grandma, my father’s mother, died years ago. We didn’t know her as well as our other grandmother.
She and my grandfather got divorced when I was very young and she moved to Los Angeles.
But she never forgot us at Christmas.
I was thinking about her gifts the other day when someone was talking about the last day to mail packages.
According to the United States Postal Service, you better get your packages in the mail by Dec. 13 - which is Wednesday - if you want to make sure they get where they are going by Christmas. (Unless of course you want to pay for Priority Mail - then you have until Dec. 20 - or the much more expensive Express Mail - then you have until Dec. 22.)
Anyway, my California Grandmother that we didn’t know very well would send us a HUGE box every Christmas, and what fun it was.
She apparently (my father told us) loved sales.
She must have shopped sales all year long and gathered up the fruits of her labor in early December to ship them to us. Every year, a week or so before Christmas, a HUGE box would come to our house - and you never knew what was going to be in those packages.
She would send cufflinks with the letter “W” on them. Now, we have no Williams or Wilmas or anybody else with a first or last name that starts with “W” in our family.
But the letter “W” was what was left when the cufflinks went on sale, so that’s what she bought.
One year, she sent these white go-go boots with flowers embroidered down the side of them. They were very cool. And, one was even the right size. Yes, ONE of them. It was a PAIR of go-go boots but each boot was a different size.
My sister and I were disappointed - but only for a second.
You see, there were still a lot of treasures to be unearthed in the box the size of a trunk. Just because the go-gos were a no-go didn’t mean there weren’t many wonderful things still to come.
She would always send pink dress shirts for my father. Back then, my father wasn’t a pink-shirt-wearing kind of guy (not that he’s crazy about them now). But, once again, pink was likely the only color left in a 17-inch neck when the shirts went on sale.
Those didn’t go to waste like the “W” cufflinks, however. My sister and I wore them as nightshirts.
I think what made those Christmas boxes from our California grandma so fun was the total irresponsibility that went into filling them.
And that was very different from the grandma we knew. The grandma who slept in the chair last Christmas.
She was practical and frugal and bought us pajamas and knitted us mittens and fed us wholesome food.
The pajamas SHE bought us were flannel and in our size ... we didn’t have to fashion them out of pink dress shirts my dad didn’t want.
So there you have it. That explains my three brothers and my sister and me.
What it explains I don’t quite know, but if you ever see me hobbling down the street in one brown boot with no heel and one black boot with a high heel and wearing hand-knit mittens that are keeping me from getting a firm grip on a big brown box I am schlepping to the post office, don’t feel sorry for me.
Because I was lucky enough to have two grandmas.
And not everybody can say that.