X is for Xmas

Friday, June 25, 2010

Ok, I was going to go with the good old faithful ‘X is for Xylophone’ and I probably could have told the story about when I was 8 and I was part of a primary school student working bee in which I got to hollow out a piece of wood to make the ‘G’ block for a Marimba – but that would have pretty much been the end of the story, and at this late stage of my A-Z, five lines on my marimba making skills probably wouldn't cut it.

Instead I’ve grasped at the only other word that I could possibly come up with that starts with X, other than X-Ray. Since I’ve never had one of those it would make writing about it pretty hard.


So today X is for Xmas and some of my memories from over the years.


I think I’ve pretty much flogged the subject of Xmas to death here on my blog. Anyone who reads regularly will know that I love Christmas. I think it’s because I can still remember all of the childhood excitement of waking up on Christmas morning, knowing that downstairs the best day of the year awaited me. Family, presents, food, fun – every year since I was born these things have featured in my Christmases – although the way in which I rank them has changed over the years.

When you’re 5 years old the order is something like Presents, Fun, Food then Family. Nowadays for me it’s closer to Family, Fun, Food then Presents. I guess the only thing that hasn’t changed is how I rank the fun-level of the day.


I can remember waking up on Christmas day at 5 years of age and running out of my room to see if Santa had come while I slept. The house was covered in red string. My brother was there, reading a letter that Santa had left, saying that if we followed the string, it would lead us to our Christmas present. We ran all over the house after this piece of string; back and forwards countless times, until it led us to the back door. We opened it up to find a new cubby house in the backyard – about the size of a small shed, but half the height. We were beside ourselves with excitement. I don’t think we left that cubby for the next week except to sleep – and only then because Mum made us.


I remember handing out presents from under the tree when I was 4 and getting upset when everyone laughed because I didn’t know that my great grandfather’s name was Eric – I thought someone had written the wrong name on the gift (he was just ‘Great Grandad’ to me).


I remember my nanna giving me a really old-fashioned gold mesh purse with 20 cents in it when I was 7, and her telling me that it’s bad luck to give someone an empty purse. I remember laughing at that memory at age 25 when my mother in law gave me a purse for Christmas and I opened it to find she’d left the price tag inside.


I remember my nanna’s sister giving us a cassette tape of Christmas songs she had made for us, and that one of them was what we called the laughing song – Some guy laughing his way through Jingle bells. We listened to it so often and laughed so much that Mum had to confiscate it.


I remember one of Mum’s distant relatives coming to visit one Christmas when I was really little. He was a very jolly, very tall Greek man with an enormous walrus moustache. We were very young and none of us could pronounce his name, so we called him Mr Moustachio. He thought it was hilarious.



Now that I’m 28, I don’t wake up with that same feeling of excitement that I did at age five, but that hasn’t changed how much I look forward to the day. I appreciate it for a whole range of other reasons than I did before, but I appreciate it all the same. The day might not have the religious significance for me that it was originally intended to, but I think the celebration of family, fun, good food and giving gifts to the ones you love is worth just as much.


This entry is part of my ‘A-Z of Me’ Series. 26 Days of alphabetically ordered random crap about me and my life. You can read the rest here.

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