The Christmas Queen

Every year now when Christmas Eve comes along I take a moment to remember my little sweet 5 foot Grandma Norma. For she was my Christmas Queen! I have never met anyone who can come close to the kind of decorating my Grandma did at Christmas. Thinking back on those Christmas eves when Grandma had her four children come home for the holiday, they brought their spouses and kids to a mountain side of gifts. My Grandma would come alive with such happiness, with such glory and warmth that as even a very small child I remember it so well. Now my mom with her 2 sisters, and 1 sister-in-law would bring trays of food, cookies and homemade candies. My Grandpa would add fire wood to the stoves, the conversations would be moving around the house as us kids jumped around the big Christmas tree. With 9 adults and 6 kids all getting their own gift from each family the hours of just unwrapping alone took us sometimes into midnight.  Since my sister and I are little over a year apart whatever she got I knew mine was the same thing in a different color. We went around the circle from youngest to oldest in opening one gift for everyone to watch. I can remember my baby cousin Kendra trying to figure out why was everyone starring at her as her mom helped to get her gift unwrapped. Then by the time Grandpa Ansil was unwrapping his gift slowly and shakily,  I would find myself sneaking out of the living room to eat another plate of snacks. I was 12 years old when I realized this system of Christmas Eve wasn't anything like the Baby Jesus story, I think that my Grandma loved the opening gifts part of Christmas Eve because everyone stayed longer at the house so she would give 4 or 6 gifts per each family member. Once the gifts were open the families soon left, maybe because it was so late. Then gift opening started earlier and earlier each year due to the complaining of how long a process it all was. When Uncle Robert joined the family he said it was amazing to open these gifts having everything match, like the tie from Aunt Sonja matched the shirt from Aunt Karen and my Mom's gift to him was a matching pair of pants. My Father burst out laughing at this family newbie explaining "It's all planned, they may act surprise but they all went shopping together so they just split up the outfit among themselves. It took me a couple of years to realize what are the odds that everything is the same setup?" I looked around the room thinking that was really clever of the ladies. My Grandma Norma would start right after Christmas buying gifts for the next year. This would be problematic come 12 months later and she can't find that first group of gifts, "You can't go down into the deep basement Kids, I am storing Christmas gifts there." I would stop on the cement steps replying "But it's just July?" She shakes her head smiling "I shop all year long." When I got older she asked me one afternoon while I was cleaning to help her find 3 gifts she was missing, she remembered buying them back in February now that it's November she can't find them. I loved my Grandma Norma for all the colorful things she did, now she didn't like kids at all and she admitted it to me once after Aunt Karen's first son had been screaming his head off, I chuckled when she walked by me saying "He needs to grow up and stop screaming." When kids did reach a certain age of communicating better then my Grandma would visually relax. When I was a kid she gave me a hard piece of black licorice that my father said I didn't have to eat, I realized she was trying but it didn't click with her what an actual kid likes. She also didn't have any patience when I came along as her first grandchild, she would swat me on the butt if I didn't do exactly what I was told. She even came into the living room once while I was playing as a small child, she just started picking up all my toy wooden blocks as she said "Clean this mess up." but I kept sitting there on that dark brown shaggy carpet watching her put everything away, I was still playing so I just got out the blocks I needed after that. When I turned 13 years old it was as if my Grandma thought to herself "Finally I can spend some time with her now." Now Grandpa always liked me when I was even still in diapers or just running around in his yard as a squealing kid. He gave me piggy back rides that felt like hundreds of feet from the ground. He had that traditional hair style of the 1950s, he actually looked similar to Donald Draper from the hit TV show "Madmen".  Grandma Norma was the first family member of mine who was actually nice to my future husband Tony. I think of how important she was to my own life all the time, She told me once that I had a good attitude for how I was handling the arrivals of new baby brothers. I had started cleaning her home once a month or whenever she was about to have company when I was fourteen, this was a time where our friendship grew and our conversations weren't interrupted. Getting ready for Christmas was a 2 month every week project, one year my Grandma offered her house up for display as part of the touring Christmas homes for a Charity through her church. Grandma went to church every Sunday by herself and decorated all the flower arrangements for the place. That is why one huge basement bedroom was dedicated to silk flowers, I will always dislike silk/fake flowers for the simple reason cleaning them is such a pain in the neck! Grandpa didn't like church or maybe he was so painfully shy. He did his own bible devotions in the bay window of his home overlooking his orchard farms. Grandma said it had been such hard work showing her home off to the people touring it, yet it was the cleanest it had ever been!  She did not just let people in to her home at random. In fact when I was 15 years old walking on the farm I took one my girlfriends over to pop in on Grandma, but she met us at the door saying her home was way to cluttered to have any company. I realized I should have called her first, but if it had been just me she wouldn't have blinked an eye. Grandma Norma never, never ever threw anything out! Oh Lordy! if she could help it and it wasn't rotten she kept it. (THIS is where my phobia started about trash and stuff crowding me out of my own place.) I would try and clean Grandma's house only to battle with her over if she should keep a half packet of that little blue bag of equal or not. Her trash was always packed tightly and very heavy to carry "I need to get this out of the house it's sinks!" I would exclaim but Grandma would run around "Oh wait here's a used Kleenex, well...I don't see any more trash I guess...but there is still room in that bag!" I grumbled back "Not if you want me to throw out my back, this is so heavy!" There was also a gross plastic bag she kept in the sink to catch peach pits and apple cores. That was always full of nats in the summer heat and smelled like tuna. In fact Tuna was Grandma number one choice of lunch, but it made her kitchen always smell like tuna long after the can was even washed out. I didn't like cleaning her bathrooms either because she came from the thought "If it's yellow let it mellow, if it's brown flush it down." So if I flushed the toilet and she heard it she would come asking why. I always lied saying I had just went #2 then she would shrug and go back to decorating her Christmas tree. When I got through just the dusting alone in that big house full of nick nacks (those are another thing I stay away from in my own adult life) it would take me a hour and half, sometimes 2. I was paid $1.50 an hour usually making $6 in a whole afternoon and my father would laugh at how the child labor laws would catch up to Grandma one day. I loved all of the Christmas decorating in Grandma's house, but the upstairs bathroom had removable carpets through out the seasons, pink for spring and gray for fall but red for Christmas and that horrid red carpet was my job to vacuum it by hand with the hose down on my hands and knees, it was such fine fabric the little pieces of lint showing up visually every time. Since that time in my life I have vowed ( So help me God) never to have carpet in my bathroom. Now I mean it when I say Grandma decorated every inch of her home for Christmas! Up on the second floor was 3 bedrooms and a bathroom (The bathroom with that red evil carpet in it) then down the stairs to the kitchen with one living room to the left  and one family room to the right. In the family room was also the dinning table, setup like a model in a magazine picture with napkin rings laid out in such Christmas style, (Now I personally think napkin rings are the most useless thing ever invented) From the dinning room table you could go outside to the patio over looking the hill side or in the opposite direction into the laundry room with side bathroom that was decorated in peach colors. This house had a basement and a deep basement, usually the deep basement was so full of stuff and so dark I never wanted to go down there because of the mice. In her basement was a second kitchen full of food, can goods and boxes of snacks, It always smelled like apple sauce in there! They also had a TV room with a soft pink striped rug on the cold cement floor next to that kitchen. The blue bathroom down there was the only one with a stand up shower that was later used as the cat litter box place. Grandma's book shelves and office was in the other half of the basement over looking the huge TV and fireplace. Grandpa always made a fire down there for the dogs on snowy Christmas eve nights. The coolest thing about the whole house was the intercom from floor to floor. I use to be down in silk flower room of the deep basement over hearing my Mom and Grandma argue through that intercom..... Grandpa would use the intercom by putting his radio up to one and letting the music fill the whole house.

Grandma's storage boxes for Christmas were endless, as we carried them up all those stairs. In the teddy bear room every stuffed animal of every shape and size had it's own Christmas outfit, so that project alone took hours! "Here, this is for the fisherman teddy, this is a basket of peppermints he holds instead of the fishing pole." Grandma would explain to me and every year she would also say "Maybe you could do this yourself while I put up the snow village." I would nodded completely confused by the whole Christmas wardrobe for this teddy bear room. She soon just took over telling me what bear wears what to save time, but it was such a job! This was just one example of the crazy shop-a-holic my Grandma was. Grandpa built wide white shelving to go all around that bedroom to displayed all the teddy bears up high, Grandma had a pincher rod to grab them down and dust them. On the guest bed laid teddy bear pillows and more bigger sized teddies, in the corner of the room Grandma setup a Christmas tree with only teddy bear orderments. When every teddy bear big and small was wearing Christmas clothes for the display of the whole teddy bear room, you could clearly see that Christmas had swallowed the room up. The next room was her own bedroom that had a lighted small Christmas tree in there as well as a small white tree with pink lights and pink orderments setup in Grandpa's changing room, that room was much smaller but it was where he shaved and stored his sweaters (those Mr. Rodgers sweaters I called them) On the wall by the stairs was hanging a half tree with gold lights just before you entered the red carpeted bedroom with another small tree of red light and all the poinsettia decorations were setup in there. The main tuna smelling kitchen had musical bells playing and blinking. The snow village was an amazing sight to behold above the family room fireplace with cotton laid out for snow and in every corner of my Grandma Norma's home was something Christmas, making it a magical place once all the hard work of cleaning it was done. I loved her gum drop tree and the big tall Christmas tree in the living room flooding out with gifts! In the basement was a small tree of only toy orderment along with rainbow lights. Even the dishes in her kitchen got traded out for holiday ware. Red pillows for the "davenport" as she would call it and I would wonder why not just say "couch"? Every year over all her years my Grandma had added to her Christmas decor and display finally ending at my last count on the Christmas eve when I was 14, of 7 small Christmas trees and one big tall full tree in the room where we opened gifts. That tree stayed traditional with white or blue lights along with breakable orderments in the matching colors. One year my Aunt Karen got to decorate the big family tree with all things mickey mouse and that was a BIG to do for my Grandma to let go of the control of that tree. It only happened once, but it was really fun! The last Christmas eve my Grandma Norma was alive, she said she worried that my boyfriend Tony wouldn't get any gifts to open while we all would be spending hours unwrapping. "He doesn't want to come if anyone gets him a gift, he would like to just visit and not stress over everyone watching him. So don't worry about it...honestly he will be fine." I had explained this over and over again. But for some reason when the group all got together on that last Christmas eve, Tony was left with seven extra gifts then everyone else....it took both of us by surprise and I still love that story for it shows the crazy gift giving mentality of the holiday traditions I came from. I wish I could go back and tell everyone that saying "I love you" is actually better then giving a gift. Though I have now come to realize some people just can't say it, so maybe the gift could help out after all? I am glad it was such a magical place being around my Grandma Norma, the Christmas Queen! I loved seeing her home display like a candy land place! Even that traditional "gift orgy" was there to teach me at such a young age how to wake up from this materialistic world, Tony remembers that time as something he wouldn't of believed unless he saw it for himself, when I said we would be opening gifts for 6 hours straight he laughed kindheartedly but by the end he said "You have GOT to be Kidding me! Imagine if one of every gift was donated to the poor? you could shorten this time frame down by a couple of hours!" I remember laughing with tears thinking that in my new life Christmas was going to change. Yet Grandma with her Christmas house coat and matching slippers wearing her Santa hat while serving out peppermint ice cream still lingers in my mind as clear as it was just yesterday, I see her smile back at me saying "I think I will leave the tree up until its closer to Valentines day, Can you still come help in taking it down?" 
I nod back at her just laughing, for there was no one in my life as full of the Christmas spirit quite like my Grandma Norma!