And Christmas remembering

 One day when I was leaving to head back to campus, before the end of the semester, I had put the lights on the tree on (little LED lights, so negligible fire risk or energy cost, and I was going to be back in a couple hours). It was a gray day outside, so it was kind of dark, and as I turned back after turning off the overhead light from the switch, seeing the lights on the tree, I had a visceral memory of looking at the tree the various years when I was a child.

I use multicolored lights, and some of them blink. And yeah, theyr'e not the same as the old, big, C7s we had when I was a kid, but they're close enough given the increased safety of these. 

And just..yeah. In my family we did multicolored lights. So I do them. I think both my parents, the years their trees had lights, had multicolored ones (my mom says she just BARELY remembers a year or two where there were candles on the tree, and they were only lit for a few minutes, and the children had to stand very still at a distance to look, and there was a bucket of water next to the tree in case... and it's entirely likely that that was a Christmas at HER grandparents, who didn't have electricity). 

I remember my dad saying he remembered bubble lights, and when the newer ones came out, we got some, and swapped out some of the C7 bulbs for them. (I presume LED ones aren't made; the LEDs probably don't get hot enough to boil the methylene chloride in them)

But yes. I think a lot of us who "do" things for Christmas as adults want, on some level, to do the things we did as a child (well, provided our childhoods were no more miserable than the average). I know couples who argue over "multicolored vs. white lights" on the tree because one had one kind and the other had the other. 

And I admit, if at this late date, it fell to my lot to be part of a couple, I probably wouldn't make a stink about it if he wanted white lights. Though I *might* be unhappy if, for example, he didn't want the various idiosyncratic ornaments I have and JUST wanted plain, solid-colored balls. (As a kid, I knew some people who had different decorations every year - either they rented them or they literally threw out/sold everything they had and bought new the next year; they did color schemes so one year it was all gold and teal, and another pink and pale green....And again - I always liked seeing the same old ornaments I remembered. There are some my mom and I put up that are probably close to as old as I am - and some that are even older.)

For me, remembering the good old times is part of it. Yes, I know: a person needs to make new memories too, but.....well, my recent "new memories" from Christmas have been:

2016, the year my mom fell on the ice, cracking a rib, and leading to me having to decorate the tree essentially alone, fix all the special foods alone, and be okay with some presents that were not wrapped

2019, the first year my mom and I did Christmas without my dad

2020, me doing Christmas here all alone, by myself, when it still didn't even feel fully safe to go into a grocery store - so I didn't even have the consolation of going antiquing in the days before. 

(This post was written in the past, so maybe something particularly good and memorable happened? I hope)

But again - the vague memories of childhood, where Christmas in my mind is mostly just a candy-colored glob of vague impressions - oh, I kind of remember the year I got the Fisher-Price Castle for Christmas, and I have a photo of the year I got the stuffed Pink Panther that I still have, and I remember going to Breakfast with Santa a few times at the old downtown Akron Polsky's before they closed down. And I remember the years I made TONS of cookies and candy in graduate school - ironically, I had a lot more time then. And I used to bring it to gettogethers and to offices on campus to share and all that. And I remember the couple of years we went to my maternal grandmother's in Michigan....but mostly, like I said, it's just a candy-colored kaleidoscopic glob of memories, where there's this vague happiness mixed in with the gifts and the decorations and the cookies and everything.

Oh, and one more: for many, many years after we'd aged out of the literal Santa, we still put out cookies and milk, even past the times when my brother and I had moved out and only came back for holidays.