No matter where he’d been in the world—or where he went directly afterward—my wonderful Navy husband was always home for Christmas. The first year after we were married, we spent Christmas in Vallejo, California. I didn’t do a lot of Christmas baking in those days. I confess I really didn’t know much about cooking. I know—it's shocking. I could keep us alive with the food I prepared, but I won’t rave about my marvelous culinary skills.
We lived in a place called Roosevelt Terrace—I’m thinking Teddy Roosevelt named it after himself—and the best thing you could say about it was that it had black asphalt tile floors that shone like polished mirrors after we bit the military housing bullet and actually polished the floors. (EEK!) Military housing had a regulation, at least in those days, that any resident will strip any wax off the floors before vacating the premises. The little place came with furniture for transient residents (we were only there for seven months) and our dining table and chairs were painted haze gray. (That’s the same color they use on a surface ship’s hull.) Lovely! So we “antiqued” it a cheerful green. (EEK!) Not allowed—(due to those pesky rules and regs, don’t you know). For some reason, though, the lady at the transient housing office liked us. She came for a “surprise” inspection one lovely day and gushed that the place hadn’t looked that good in years. Lucky us—since it meant we didn’t have to strip floors and repaint furniture before we left. But the place was cleaner than it had ever been since it had been built, possibly as early as sometime not long after the Civil War. In the Navy of that day, Roosevelt Terrace was not so lovingly known by the nasty little moniker of Roach Terrace. (YUCK!)
I digress. Well, back to Christmas. About ten days before Christmas we drove to the base Christmas Tree lot to pick out our tree. I’ll give you three guesses about what the trees looked like by that time. You’ll only need one. The tree was so crappy they gave us 75% off just to rid themselves of the pathetic shrub. Before we left base, we discovered a couple of large evergreen limbs that had somehow escaped from somebody’s nicer looking tree. We stopped and salvaged them and my husband—the monarch of improvisation—wired them in place on the two or three barest spots on ours. Those were the days when people started EARLY to decorate their houses and The Family Tree. They were also the days when stores tried to actually run out of ornaments before the Big Day. The pickings were slim by ten days before Christmas, needless to say. We decorated our tree with monstrously large Christmas lights, green glass balls, and icicles. It wasn’t memorable.
We spent our second Christmas in Idaho. Snow abounded. Many feet of it. Along with a couple of friends we knew, we drove up into the Teton Mountains in an ancient VW van to cut our Christmas tree. Once we arrived, my husband and our friend hopped out of the van and trudged up the slope of a hill where they’d seen a perfect tree. Do you recall Chevy Chase in Christmas Vacation? After reaching it, they realized that what they’d found was just the top of a tree—a seventy-foot-tall tree, to be precise. What do any two intrepid sailors do? They cut the thing. Happily, they left but the last ten feet. Whew. So we hauled down the mountain. What I failed to mention on the trip to find the trees was that the van had no heater. It also had a couple of holes in the floorboards. It must’ve been near zero degrees or lower outside and inside you could have flash-frozen meat. Which we just about did!
Our third Christmas was spent in New Mexico with parents. Our daughter was only seven weeks old and my husband was about to leave on his first deployment. The apartment had been packed, cleaned, and vacated in Newport News, Virginia. We left Albuquerque in April and moved to Summerville, South Carolina where we spent our fourth Christmas.
Our third Christmas was spent in New Mexico with parents. Our daughter was only seven weeks old and my husband was about to leave on his first deployment. The apartment had been packed, cleaned, and vacated in Newport News, Virginia. We left Albuquerque in April and moved to Summerville, South Carolina where we spent our fourth Christmas.
We spent our fifth Christmas in Massachusetts the following year. The snow flew just two weeks after we arrived, which was just two days after Thanksgiving. We had quarters that backed up to the flight line of a closed air force base outside of Chicopee. I unloaded boxes and put everything in its place inside of a week and began shopping and baking Christmas cookies. Dozens and dozens of them. You name it, I made it. Nürnburger, Berlinerkranzer, Springerle, Lebkuchen, Sandbakelser, shortbread, gingerbread boys, iced sugar cookies in Christmas shapes, Moravian ginger cookies, oatmeal raisin cookies, Mexican wedding cakes (though I’ve never been sure what’s Mexican about them), and my husband’s favorite chocolate chip cookies. I loved doing it. There’s something very cheery about a warm kitchen and the odor of cookies baking on a cold, snowy day. That year we brought home a Colorado blue spruce tree we’d cut at a tree farm in the countryside not far away. It was maybe the prettiest tree we’d ever had.
This year will mark our forty-fourth Christmas together. The eight-foot tree will stand in front of our floor to ceiling windows and be loaded with Christmas ornaments from every place we’ve ever lived or visited. Our daughter thinks we have too many and that I’ve taken Christmas-ornament-fanaticism to new and dizzying heights. But everything will be on the tree in just the right place and the kitchen will, once again, be warm with the sweet, spicy odor of yummy cookies wafting through the house.
And I'm joyful....
And I'm joyful....