The Christmas Lady

My folks are long gone from this life and I think of each of them under certain conditions or at particular times of year. I think of my Dad at work a lot, because the work ethic is something I think I inherited from him. I also think of him when I'm fixing something around the house. He had the home repair skills of an aardvark, but he tried. He would have been proud to see me hanging drywall, sweating copper or rewiring circuits.

I also inherited from him a curiosity about the things around me. When we'd be driving the highways and byways on our annual road trips, Dad always needed to understand the story behind the things we'd drive past. You couldn't get him to stop to pee until your eyes were actually yellow, but he couldn't pass the World's Largest Open Pit Mine without stopping to take the tour. He loved touring work sites and learning things and what he'd learned on trips would become part of his patter later on. He was also sort of the keeper of the McDermott family legend, alongside his sister, my Aunt Mary. I think of him a lot during my family or business travels. To the extent that I'm able to spin a yarn, I owe that skill to my Dad.

At Christmas, thoughts invariably turn to Mom. She was indeed the Christmas Lady. When we were small, I remember the assembly and decorating of the tree as a multi-day event. Before a single ornament found its way aboard, every branch was tied up to the trunk with green string, lest they droop once loaded. Then, she'd apply the strings of lights, patiently winding around and around to achieve a homogenous look throughout. That consumed the first evening.

The next evening, we'd put on the ornaments. Each child had one ball with their name spelled out in glitter and only that child was allowed to hang that particular ball. Mom was a hard taskmaster when it came to the overall look of the tree. Hanging too many balls on the lower branches unsettled her sense of balance, bringing timely and specific correction. Too many to one side or the other was also dealt with lovingly but firmly.

After we'd gone to bed - and only after we'd gone safely to bed - Mom would go back over the tree, moving, adjusting, trimming and tying as necessary to yield the overall look she found presentable. Only then would she consider the tree ready for the piece de resistance - tinseling.

Tinsel was the crowning glory of Mom's tree decorating approach. Doing it well was considered a sign of intelligence and a deeply caring soul. Doing it poorly was tantamount to a high crime. Woe betide the child or Dad who put too much on one branch ("You're clumping it!") or draped it in any orientation but straight up and down ("Have you ever seen an icicle grow sideways?").

This probably sounds very compulsive and even overbearing but it wasn't. Not really. We all went along because we knew that when we were done, we'd be looking at a thing of beauty. And year after year, that's precisely what came to pass.

  Mom's compulsion about Christmas perfection also extended to wrapping technique. When decorating  a gift, the paper had to lay perfectly flat with better-than-hospital corners and tape perfectly applied, exactly parallel to the edge of the paper. Bows were largely homemade from the ribbon we bought in econo spools. By the time we were ten, each of us could wrap a present to military specifications, including curling the ends of the ribbon using the thumb-against-scissor-edge method.

Gifts were something else. The best Christmases were those that involved handmade gifts from "Santa." Like the Matchbox scale whole city my brother and I played with for several years until Godzilla (our cat who likely wasn't aware of the role in which she'd been cast) chewed off the ends of all the telephone poles and batted the fake bushes to smithereens. Or the clothing she sewed for my sisters' dolls, the best-dressed little pseudo humans in Lake Hills.

Santa did misstep once or twice. Like the time "he" brought me a complete football outfit. My parents were confused when they found out I'd given away the whole uniform to a friend who actually liked football except for the helmet, which my brother and I used as a stand-in for an astronaut's headgear. But it was easy to forgive these occasional fauxs pas when you'd show up with an unexpected friend for dinner and magically, a perfectly appropriate gift - wrapped and labeled - would be presented to the unannounced guest as though it was nothing out of the ordinary. I never quite figured out how she pulled that off but she did, again and again.

My mom died years ago. But before she passed away, she passed on a certain reverence for approaching Christmas as a crusade. We don't follow all her edicts - our tree is "fake," in a nod to my allergy to spider mites. And the Bellevue McDermotts have established our own tradition of hanging and filling Chirstmas stockings, which was never part of Mom's game plan.

Even so, she's right here with us at least once each year. In the perfectly wrapped gifts and the big late-afternoon feast. In many of the decorations that have found their way onto our shelves and tables. In the tradition of buying gifts for a needy family from one of the "sharing trees" at the local mall, we respect Mom's determination that come hell or high water, every kid gets a gift at Christmas.

I suppose much of this seems fairly passe. Many families share most of these traditions and I'd guess lots of you look on your own mothers as a Christmas original. And of course, we're all right.

For me, Christmas came each year in the person of my Mom. So, you'll excuse me if for this one day, she's the most important person in my world.

Happy Holidays to each and all of you from Marion's baby boy!