CHILDHOOD HOLIDAY MEMORIES

by Cynthia Houck

Christmas during my early childhood was magical.

Christmas Day started with Mass. After church, we headed to Grandma and Grandpa Taylor’s to celebrate with them and Mom’s two sisters and their families. Breakfast was ham and eggs with two kinds of homemade bread, plain and raisin, as well as several kinds of pie and two cakes Grandma made from scratch every Christmas. My favorite was her “Bride’s Cake.” It was a pound cake made in a tube pan and covered with butter icing. It was her mother’s recipe, and Grandma had made it for her own wedding. She wouldn’t share the recipe with anyone, but I finally talked her into giving it to me so it wouldn’t be lost. We exchanged gifts in a flurry of wrapping paper and ribbons. There were six of us grandkids so you can imagine the excitement.

Then it was off to Grandma and Grandpa Aylor’s for a dinner of turkey and the trimmings with Daddy’s family. We would play bingo all afternoon for 25¢ items that the adults brought for prizes. Grandpa made furniture and caned chairs, and he would make a couple nice things like small lamps for the coverall games. One Christmas, my young cousin, Donny Joe, cried and said we were cheating because he wasn’t winning. I can still hear Gram saying, “Oh, Joe, how can you cheat at Bingo?” When it got dark, Gramp would fry hotdogs for us in an iron skillet. Since we always boiled them at home, I thought Gramp’s were the best in the world.

But the day wasn’t over yet. After supper, we’d all go to Grandma Great’s house (Grandpa Aylor’s mother) to watch her open her presents. Her gifts were placed in a large straw laundry basket, and she would open them one at a time. Daddy’s aunts, uncles and cousins would all be there with their children. Grandma Great was blind, and her son and his family lived upstairs. Her kitchen fascinated me. It was a couple steps down from the rest of the house, and there was a long handled pump on the sink like you see in old movies. I was never allowed to go upstairs. Mom told me there were bats up there, but I think she was just trying to keep me away from the other family’s home. I remember a stained glass window on the stair landing.

We wouldn’t get home till bedtime. I thought it was wonderful, but my parents must have been exhausted. Our tradition of opening our gifts at home on Christmas Eve began then because we were out all day on Christmas Day.

We always spent New Year’s Day with Daddy’s family at his sister’s house, playing Monopoly. We never finished a game because people kept getting in and out of the game all day long. We had a big meal there, too. I don’t remember what was served, but I have a picture of us around a table covered in a fancy tablecloth.

Daddy died when I was seven. Mom, my sister Claudia, and I moved to Grandma and Grandpa Taylor’s house. We still had the big breakfasts at Christmas for a few years, but we didn’t always get to celebrate with the Aylors because Mom didn’t drive, and we sometimes couldn’t get to their home. Claudia and I took charge of decorating the tree and putting out the manger scene in the entry hall. We always did it while Cincinnati’s Ruth Lyons Holiday Hello Show aired on WLW-T. Claudia remembers lying under the tree and listening to the music box in the crèche playing Silent Night. She still has an ornament that’s special to us. It’s made of faceted green plastic with a green ribbon at the top. Daddy gave it to Mother, filled with Evening in Paris perfume. There were French doors between the hall and the living room, and I would use Glass Wax stencils to put Christmas designs on the glass panes in the doors. Another tradition was hanging our stockings on the newel post in the hall for St. Nicholas on the night of December 5. The next morning, they would be filled with apples, oranges, walnuts and candy canes. Candy canes used to be porous, and we would stick them into the oranges and suck out peppermint flavored orange juice.

Later holidays were good, but their memories can’t compare with those of our childhood years.