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Home For Christmas

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The Tampa Tribune

Published: December 10, 2008

I've been known to cry in the supermarket when I hear "I'll Be Home for Christmas." When I'm really touched, I sob. Other people don't like sobbing in public, as I found out when I was asked to leave the movie "Imitation of Life," I was attending long ago with several high school girlfriends. So far I've never been chastised for crying over Walter Kent's well-known song. However, I'm sure I'm on borrowed time, as I make a blubbering nuisance of myself every year.

"I'll be home for Christmas. You can plan on me. Please have snow and mistletoe and presents on the tree."

Yep, there'd be snow on the ground in Indiana at Christmas. In fact, a happy memory is of Mom and me trying to do last-minute gift shopping while slipping, sliding, and laughing in the snow as we went store to store. We weren't a kissing family so mistletoe was not part of my Christmas until much later, when I was trying to connect with some love interest. And presents - there were always lots of presents under, not on, our family's Christmas tree. As I look back, I often wonder how my middle-class parents, struggling to make ends meet, could afford the number of gifts they did for me and my three younger brothers.
Christmas trees evoke many memories of their own for me. I recently read that old aluminum revolving trees bring big money on eBay. Yes, we had one. Long before aluminum trees, or fake ones of any kind, we always had a live tree purchased during the family ritual of trooping - not to the forest, but to the Lions Club lot - to select the perfect one. Many arguments ensued when my brothers would throw the tinsel on the trees, while I thought each strand should be lovingly placed in a perfect spot. My ninety-year-old mother now gets out the pretty green ceramic tree I gave her as she entered that stage of "treedom." There are stages, you know, as we mature, with less and less energy, and fewer children around - we go from the big chopped-down tree, to the little chopped-down tree, to the big purchased-from-the-lot tree, to the little purchased-from-the-lot tree, to the big artificial tree, to the little artificial tree, and finally, to the ceramic tree.

My father, who was normally more the Ebenezer Scrooge type, enjoyed Christmas more than any kid ever could. He loved to disguise gifts by wrapping them in strange shapes. I remember worrying one year when I was handed a Sputnik-shaped gift only to be thrilled when opening it to discover my beloved Toni doll. Mother got a small fur stole wrapped in a toilet seat box. And on and on - there was never a disguise too inappropriate for my dad. It's still a family joke about the time when Dad's normal Scrooge-like behavior emerged at Christmas and he bought a whole roll of wrapping paper so large it was a foot in diameter and five feet wide. Our family still uses it!

"Christmas Eve will find me where the love light gleams. I'll be home for Christmas if only in my dreams."

Although there was plenty of love at Christmastime in my family, as everyone was in a good, holiday-anticipating mood, Christmas Eve found us with gleaming candlelight, not love light. We would attend church for the lovely candlelight service to celebrate Jesus' birth, the reason for the season. Then it was home to bed, so we kids could get up very early to check out the gifts from Santa.

Oh, the wonderful memories through the years! And oh, the many years when I haven't been able to go home for the holidays to see my beloved family, now much, much larger due to my prolific brothers with their 18 children and many grandchildren. (I'm sure I'm crying by now.)

Until recently, the last time I flew was a last-minute, day-before-Christmas decision -- I just couldn't be away from my family another year. In the many years since I lived in Indiana, I've taken cross-country trains to be home for the holidays. I have many tales of those trips during a busy Christmas season - sleeping in the train lavatory because there were no seats, sitting on my luggage for the same reason, being stranded for hours on the Altoona Horseshoe Curve in a train car with no heat, and sleeping in hard, wooden train station seats, waiting for a much-delayed train to arrive - perhaps material for more memoirs someday.

Many Christmas memories are hidden away in my mind, hopefully to emerge one day. Those which come to mind are about the magical good times at home. Unfortunately, for most years since childhood, I've been home for Christmas but only in my dreams. Perhaps many of you can relate to wonderful holiday memories and many years when you were separated from loved ones.

"I'll be home for Christmas.

You can plan on me.

Please have snow and mistletoe
And presents on the tree."

"Christmas Eve will find me

Where the love light gleams.

I'll be home for Christmas

If only in my dreams."

Rosie Clifton is the author of "Kissing Lots of Frogs, a Long Journey to Love." She may be reached through her Web site at rosieclifton.com.

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