Later today I’ll be starting the trek back home to West Tennessee for the Holiday. It’ll take 12 hours of driving before I pull into the driveway and start stuffing myself with the classic array of homemade Christmas goodies, rearranging the characters of the nativity scene, and flipping the refrigerator magnets upside down (the last 2 to be done of course only out of love & in jest to pick at my Mother).

Indeed the Holiday marks a time of great traditions at many a home.  A time filled with great joy and laughter and stress and the occasional family argument. I’ve mentioned in the past few weeks how the Spirit of the Season often escapes me and because of that, I’ve been notoriously proclaimed the Scrooge of my family and now, for the first time ever, I’m going to tell exactly why and how it all started.

I’m the youngest of four children and I remember Christmas at our house being one of the most exciting times of the whole year. The house would be all decorated, we would all help make the different cookies and I had a lot more people to play with during the day since my brothers and sister were home from school. On Christmas Eve, I would beg my parents to let me stay up to go to Candle Light Mass with my brothers and sister, even though the first couple of years I inevitably fell asleep half way through or spilled candle wax all over my dress. And come Christmas morning, Santa would have visited and we  all had to line up in front of the fireplace for a picture, dressed up in all our glory, before we were allowed to even touch one single present. My parents would sit and watch us light up with every inch of paper we tore and bow we through to the side and the living room would be filled with such great wonder and joy and well, what I thought, magic. Everyone was happy. Everyone was together.

As the years passed, we all started to grow up. Somewhere along the line I stopped believing in Santa and realized the real Santa (the one who foot the bill) of our family was our Dad and our Mother went and got all the presents for everyone. But that to me wasn’t the saddest part of growing up and watching the Holiday change. For me it was that gradually, over time, people stopped coming home. It was sparingly at first but then the number started to dwindle down more and more. Less people were around on Christmas morning and the magic I had once loved started to dwindle with them. I started trying harder every year – a secret mission known unto myself – to capture that spirit of Holidays past and bring back what I loved so dearly about it all. But year by year I felt like it was all slipping away. I didn’t understand. And then, my junior year of high school, I simply gave up. It was the turning point where I, too, had to grow up and realize things would simply never be the same as they were. Not even for Christmas. And thus was my downward spiral into Scrooge-dom.

The blame doesn’t fall on any one person. There’s not even real blame to point. It just happens. Families grow up. New families are formed. Santa passes away. Factors such as work, in-law time share schedules, flights, finances and the like come into play, and you find yourself trying to see how many calendars can align with your own and say well – maybe next year to the ones that don’t fit.

These past few years I’ve made a new commitment to myself each year to chip away at the Scrooge that had taken place of my Christmas Spirit. Slowly yet surely it’s working and each year I feel less Scrooge-like and more, well, magic-like. It’s coming back, just in a new form. A grown-up form I guess.

Although I can’t even remember the last time we were all home on Christmas morning, I’ll always know …. somewhere in my memory …. those Christmas mornings I hold so dear will always live on.

Somewhere in My Memory by John Williams

(If you have trouble viewing this video, please click here.)

Because that’s what the Holiday is really all about, I think. The precious moments.

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