Christmas Memories, Part 2

Childhood Christmases involved more than midnight hikes. 

Sometime in mid-December "the big kids" would arrive from college, three cousins whose parents served overseas as missionaries.  My mom always had a long list of jobs for them to do, sometimes including cutting down the Christmas tree for the living room (and the cookie tree and small trees for each of our bedroom windows), making Christmas cookies, etc.  My dad had a list, too, including milking cows, providing special music on Sundays at church, etc. 

I remember them coming to our grade school to play Christmas music on guitar & autoharp.  I remember traipsing over the hills with them to cut down the trees, and then arranging the tall tree in the living room so that it would not fall! I remember going Christmas shopping with them.

We had to institute a seating chart for meals, because we children all clamored to sit next to them.  And when they left to return to college in January, we all were depressed.  But we had new stories to add to our imaginative play ... such as sitting on the stairs, pretending it was a college lecture room.  

Closer to Christmas, a station wagon filled with 6 people and laden with their luggage and gifts and lots of food would pull up the driveway.  Uncle J, Aunt R, and their children had arrived!  They brought roasted peanuts, pecans, honey, garden produce, delicious decorated Christmas cookies, and loaves of bread, all home-grown or homemade.  

And my mom prepared beds for all and three full meals a day, always including one of homemade tomato soup (from tomatoes canned from our garden) with toasted cheese sandwiches.  We might have had cereal and toast for breakfast, but I doubt it!  Sometimes, when extra guests were there, there was a card table set up in the corner of the dining room for the "kids' table," but mostly we were thankful for the v-e-r-y long dining room table our grandfather had purchased decades ago, which could be expanded to basically fill the entire length of the dining room!

After each meal and the Bible reading, we would linger.   By the time that many hands had made light work of clearing the table and doing the dishes (the dishwasher always seemed to be broken at Christmastime!), it was time to start on the next meal.  We spent hours around that table!