Procrastinating...
Dec. 24th, 2009 09:29 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
susandennisI need to clean up the kitchen before I go to the gym and so before I do that, I'm finishing my coffee in hopes that something will cancel the gym thing. I know it won't, but still...
When my parents got married in 1948, the first thing they did was move 1,500 miles away from their parents and never moved back. They started creating their own family traditions and they were very good at it. Christmas Eve was our biggie. Santa came to us first cause we were special. He came after dinner just as we we finished putting on the pajamas that Great Aunt Etta sent to us each year.
But the morning of Christmas Eve is what I'm remembering now. My Mom baked acres of Christmas cookies every year. Pretty ones, tasty ones, traditional ones, weird ones - dozens and dozens and dozens and dozens. Then with tin pie pans, white tissue paper, cellophane and red ribbons, she made beautiful packages for dozens of family friends.
It was the job of Daddy and my brother and sister and me to deliver them all on Christmas Eve. We loaded up the station wagon. (I should link to Wikipedia for that one, probably.) and set out. Most people on our route looked forward to the delivery every year and it was fun. We called out dibs for the best folks like Old Mr. Hanes (yes, the original Mr. Hanes who started Hanes underwear... Daddy's boss). They had a grand house with a butler who was the best hugger in the world and Mr. Hanes always gave each of us a silver dollar.
This morning I sent my brother an IM telling him that I was calling dibs on taking cookies into George and Helen's. George and Helen were a couple who were special family friends. They had no children so everyone's children - us - were treated like royalty. Their house was so pretty.
(The other thing I remember is that George and Helen did not smoke cigarettes. This was HUGE since we lived in Winston-Salem which, only had two industries then... RJ Reynolds tobacco and Hanes. George and Helen were THE only two adults I ever knew, as a child, who did NOT smoke. But at cocktail parties, they always had an unlit cigarette in their hands. Always. I asked my Mom about this and she explained that it was only polite to support local industry and if you didn't smoke at least carrying a cigarette showed your support. It sounds bizarre now, I know but then, not so much.)
It occurs to me this morning that my family's traditions also lived practical lives and died nicely when it was time. Around the time that my sister (we were a year and a half apart) and I had just gone off to college, they shipped my brother off to boarding school and they moved to New York City. Christmas in New York City was so thrilling that no one noticed we weren't delivering cookies any more plus, we left the station wagon behind.
Ok, enough. I need to get to the kitchen and to the gym. Then I have knitting to do.![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
legalmoose just twittered that the project in Today's Basket might be "A frog-pig; the love child of Kermit & Miss Piggy." My first thought was oh, how would that look... but that was soon replaced with eewwwww. Plus, Miss Piggy is nobody's fool, she would never do the nasty without iron clad birth control.
When my parents got married in 1948, the first thing they did was move 1,500 miles away from their parents and never moved back. They started creating their own family traditions and they were very good at it. Christmas Eve was our biggie. Santa came to us first cause we were special. He came after dinner just as we we finished putting on the pajamas that Great Aunt Etta sent to us each year.
But the morning of Christmas Eve is what I'm remembering now. My Mom baked acres of Christmas cookies every year. Pretty ones, tasty ones, traditional ones, weird ones - dozens and dozens and dozens and dozens. Then with tin pie pans, white tissue paper, cellophane and red ribbons, she made beautiful packages for dozens of family friends.
It was the job of Daddy and my brother and sister and me to deliver them all on Christmas Eve. We loaded up the station wagon. (I should link to Wikipedia for that one, probably.) and set out. Most people on our route looked forward to the delivery every year and it was fun. We called out dibs for the best folks like Old Mr. Hanes (yes, the original Mr. Hanes who started Hanes underwear... Daddy's boss). They had a grand house with a butler who was the best hugger in the world and Mr. Hanes always gave each of us a silver dollar.
This morning I sent my brother an IM telling him that I was calling dibs on taking cookies into George and Helen's. George and Helen were a couple who were special family friends. They had no children so everyone's children - us - were treated like royalty. Their house was so pretty.
(The other thing I remember is that George and Helen did not smoke cigarettes. This was HUGE since we lived in Winston-Salem which, only had two industries then... RJ Reynolds tobacco and Hanes. George and Helen were THE only two adults I ever knew, as a child, who did NOT smoke. But at cocktail parties, they always had an unlit cigarette in their hands. Always. I asked my Mom about this and she explained that it was only polite to support local industry and if you didn't smoke at least carrying a cigarette showed your support. It sounds bizarre now, I know but then, not so much.)
It occurs to me this morning that my family's traditions also lived practical lives and died nicely when it was time. Around the time that my sister (we were a year and a half apart) and I had just gone off to college, they shipped my brother off to boarding school and they moved to New York City. Christmas in New York City was so thrilling that no one noticed we weren't delivering cookies any more plus, we left the station wagon behind.
Ok, enough. I need to get to the kitchen and to the gym. Then I have knitting to do.
legalmoose just twittered that the project in Today's Basket might be "A frog-pig; the love child of Kermit & Miss Piggy." My first thought was oh, how would that look... but that was soon replaced with eewwwww. Plus, Miss Piggy is nobody's fool, she would never do the nasty without iron clad birth control.