Do you remember your first christmas memory? Here's my shocking story...

Hi Gatherers,   

I wanted to share a story about my first Christmas memories with you.  I'm also very excited to announce that Gather has asked me to do another live chat to talk about my new Book “Merry Christmas, America!” The Chat will be moderated by Gather member Ron Hall on Wednesday, November 14^th at 7 p.m. ET in the Family Essential.  Hope to see you all there!

My first memory of Christmas is of electric lights—electric being the key word. I was three years old, tinkering with lights beneath the bottom branches of a scrawny fir in my grandmother’s living room. In rural South Carolina, trees were plucked from wherever they could be found, and my grandmother typically found hers somewhere along the railroad tracks behind her mill-village house. Every year, around Thanksgiving, she’d head down past her pecan trees, saw in one hand, my hand in the other, to find a scrawny specimen. In later years, after she’d snatched every sapling, from the depot a quarter mile to the north to the bridge a quarter mile to the south, she resorted to roadside nabbing, which she’d perform during one of her infamous saw-in-the-trunk shortcuts. My grandfather always drove the getaway car. Each year after the hack job, she’d drag the thirsty thing back up to the house, stick it in a wrought iron stand, and pour it a cocktail of ginger ale and water. We were teetotalers, so the tree should be too. First came the lights. They were big and colorful. And, as I’d discover later, searingly hot.

But my first Christmas memory is sticking the prongs of the plug into the outlet, along with my forefinger. The memory is still shocking: stunningly, staggeringly electric. Think Phyllis Diller hair, and tears that burst forth like rain from a storm cloud.  Several years later, I had forgiven the lights, and my mother had become fast friends with a “crafty” sort named Judy McChesney. It was not uncommon to see McCall’s pantsuit patterns spread out on the shag rug of the McChesneys’ living room and elaborate cross-stitch scenes framed on their walls. I remember arriving at Judy’s ornament decorating festivities and being instantly struck by the divergence of red, gold, and green splashed against 1970s orange and avocado. Hers was a Christmas in swank Technicolor. But nothing could have been as exciting to my six-year-old eyes than a stack of ribbon and a box filled with enough sequins and sparkly things to cover a Bob Mackie gown.   

As I grew older, my vision of the Christmas experience expanded—to outside our house—where it could be seen beneath the glare of the yard lights and the watchful eyes of judgmental neighbors. Bigger definitely became better. One year, the first year of the neighborhood Christmas decorating contest, I wrapped our house like a present. With a tall ladder and bolts and bolts of flawed red nylon from the textile plant where my dad worked, I made our house the biggest “present” in the neighborhood. I tied a giant bow across our front door rendering it completely unusable during the holiday season. Though I didn’t win the decorating contest, I did get my picture in the paper as the kid who “tried to wrap his house.”  

A couple years later, in another failed attempt to win the “Best House” award and its congratulatory red-lettered sign, I made a tableau in which it appeared that Santa had fallen off our house into the giant molding leaf pile in our front yard. How the Nickels, with their understated Charlestonian pineapple-candle-in-each-window routine, beat my Santa-legs-and-black-boots-sticking-out-of-a-leaf-pile-and-flailing-about-in-the-breeze, is beyond me. But it did. Perhaps if we had snow in South Carolina my concept would have been a little more compelling.   

I never won the “Best House” award. But that didn’t—or hasn’t—stopped my Christmas decorating. I’m happy to live in the shadow of others who feel that anything worth doing is worth doing over the top. These are the true believers. These are the people who electrify the holiday and go all out to make every Christmas the brightest, merriest, happiest Christmas ever. 

So, tell me, what are your first memories of Christmas?

I hope you’ll join me for a live chat to talk about my new Book “Merry Christmas, America!” The Chat will be moderated by  Ron Hall on Wednesday, November 14^th at 7 p.m. ET in the   Family Essential.