The Season Was Made for Remembering |
When they were handing out “sentimental,” I went through the line twice.
My family makes fun of my nostalgic bent. That’s OK; I’ll own it — gladly.
Are you the family member born with the nostalgia gene? Were you the family’s de facto curator and memory preserver? That was me, in our family.
Nobody else really seemed to care for the old photograph albums or for the kitschy plate bought at a vacation gift shop decades ago. I rescued such things from the “Goodwill” bin more than a few times growing up — after all, if I didn’t preserve the family history, who would?
But nothing — and I mean, nothing — arrested my childhood heart like the Christmas decorations our family had accumulated. It wasn’t like they had monetary value; no, we’re talking about rarefied equity worth more than money. Our parents and grandparents had accumulated an assortment of ornaments and garlands, nativities and Santas, ranging from merely scuffed up to well-tattered.
All the Christmas stuff was stored in a couple of boxes in our farmhouse attic. To my childhood heart, that main box may as well have been the Ark of the Covenant. In ways I wouldn’t understand until decades later, it was. The random collection had passed through many hands over many years. A time or two through the year, growing up, I would peek into the attic to make sure the Christmas boxes were OK.
Christmas reminds us not to forget
Every December, something stirs in us, a feeling almost impossible to........