These are letters to Jack, my son, and my daughter, Audrey. You have given me the gift of motherhood. This is just a little gift back. I want to share my experiences with you of your childhood from my perspective of watching you grow - of being your Mom.

Friday, December 15, 2006

Ghosts of Christmas’ Past

Jack,

In emails regarding how Grandma (GG) was doing yesterday, your Aunt Lisa, Grandma Mary and myself got on the subject of past Christmas trees:

Aunt Lisa: While we are on the subject of babies and trees, would one of you care to weigh in on Matt’s memory here? A few weeks ago he told me that you guys used to put the tree in the middle of a playpen so none of you could get to it when you were babies. Is that really true? I don’t really believe it, but he swears it’s true!

Me: Yes – it’s true – except I think they put the tree in the playpen to keep it away from the cat. Remember the year that Oreo climbed the tree and then jumped off? The tree fell over and sparks flew from the outlets when the lights got yanked out of the wall. Mom – weigh in on this. Am I remembering this right?

Grandma Mary: Yes. The cat, for some god-knows-why reason, decided to take a flying leap into the tree right in front of us and then scale the branches.
Punch line: Tree falls over.
The next year, wait till you hear this one, we wired the tree to the ceiling! The tree will not crash this year! Then Bridget was standing on the ladder and lost her balance and fell into the tree.
Punch line: Tree falls over.
After we made sure that Bridget was okay we then noticed that 8 inches of the top of the tree was swinging from the ceiling. I wish I had taken a picture of that one. I wish I had taken a picture of all of the times because now I realize it is almost not believable that this has happened to me so many times.
I have tree failure.

Aunt Lisa: You guys are making this up!

Me: Mom, don't forget the time that we got the tree, you forgot to water it and it was SO dry by the time that we strung the lights on it that it was a fire hazard and we had to throw it out! :)

Aunt Lisa: Maybe THAT’S where Matt gets it from. He is always SO diligent about making sure the tree has water and recently went 36 hours without watering the tree. Now he thinks he dried it out because it’s not taking in water as much as it was before.

Grandma Mary: Then there was the year I took a couple of you kids to cut a fresh tree down but the tree lot was not open yet so the farmer gave us a saw and turned us loose on the field. When we got home dad informed us that we had cut a tree down that was not even a species of Christmas tree ever.
Turns out, he was right. Tree never saw Christmas. John III came that year early before the tree was taken down and spent a good deal of his visit blowing on our tree and watching needles fall. Yikes, how could I have so many disasters with trees. Lisa, save these E-mails for Matt to read. Take a walk down our memory lane.

Me: Here's another one. Remember the year that there was a bird in the tree when we set it up?

Grandma Mary: And it flew around the house with all of us running around trying to catch it. Crazy.


YES – CRAZY…. Aren’t you glad you are related to us, honey?

Love,

Mommy

Here are some more pieces of your beautiful artwork! A colored pencil drawing:


and your first Christmas Wreath!:

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