Snowy Boots & Sugar Cookies

As I sat alone in front of our Christmas tree in my living room (my wife and daughter had gone to an Evanescence concert), I decided to play some of the old Bing Crosby Christmas songs I had listened to as a child of the '50's. I closed my eyes, and a flood of sweet and bittersweet memories swept like butterflies across the meadows of my mind.

I could almost smell the balsam "Christmas tree" smell, and feel the dry warmth of the wood stove crackling in the night silence. The colorful lights that actually "bubbled", and "icicles" made of leaded tin and pewter. Mom had baked sugar cookies earlier, and the smell still lingered throughout the small rooms of the tiny house we called home.

Visions of Bing, Danny Kaye & Rosemary Clooney, dancing and singing at the Vermont inn, in "White Christmas". Dad carrying in wood for the stove, shaking off snow throughout his trip through the kitchen, and Mom none too happy with the mess.

And at 4 am Christmas morning, my older brother Eddie would awaken my kid brother Bobby and myself, and we would sneak out and get our ragged, long woolen stockings hanging from the bannister. Now stuffed with what in retrospect might today be called junk, each penny item was a true treasure. For the next three hours we would pore over the goodies, eat the candy, peel the orange, all the time yawning from precious little sleep the night before, as we held our ears to the vent in the floor, to hear if Santa was there yet.

My reverie was lost when the girls stomped in, shaking the snow off their own boots. And for a fleeting moment, I wished...I wished that if I could leave my daughter anything at all, I would leave her those very same, precious, bittersweet memories of a simpler time, a harder time, and a much, much treasured time. A time when the simplest things were the things that mattered most. And remembered longest!

And I smile to myself as the smell of sugar cookies waft through our home, the fire crackling in the parlor stove and the leaded icicles and bubbling lights on the balsam tree all tell me it was worth the effort to have the real thing. She may not understand it now. But someday, when she sits alone in front of her own tree, perhaps she, too, will be overcome with sweet thoughts of a simpler time, when the littlest things were the most memorable.

Merry Christmas to All, Happy Hannukah to Many, and may you all take a moment to remember...