My earliest Christmas memory: meat trays, cardboard, and Krylon

Memories are big this time of year. We spend lots of time and money trying to recreate magical childhood Christmas memories for our own kids and grandkids. We drag out Great Aunt Dot’s tablecloth and napkins (yes, I really had a great aunt named Dot. I’m not sure how I inherited her Christmas things, since I don’t think I ever met her, but I did). And then we sit around and contemplate how our current Christmas experience doesn’t measure up to those glittering, tinsel-draped memories from childhood. And then we drink (or in my case, cut another piece of chocolate custard pie).

So in the spirit of the season, I’m going to end this blog post and eat another piece of pie.

Just kidding.

I’m going to share with you one of my earliest Christmas memories. It involves styrofoam meat trays, cardboard, scrap paper, and spray paint. It’s enough to give Martha Stewart an aneurism.

But first: if this story sounds familiar, you’ve either had the misfortune of hearing me get all nostalgic at Christmastime and bore the pants off you by telling it in person, or you read an earlier version of it on my now-defunct garden blog. Or–and this is a highly unlikely possibility–someone else out there in blogland made Christmas ornaments from meat trays, cardboard, scrap paper, and spray paint.

OK, back to the story.

When I was little, my parents were poor. My father had some pretty serious mental health and addiction issues that kept him from working, and my mother had to stay home to take care of me, so their only income was my father’s VA and disability pensions, which didn’t go far, even in the early 1970s. We bounced around from rented house to rented house, and my mother told me we even spent a few nights in a Salvation Army shelter when I was maybe one or two years old. When I was about four or five, we lived in a milker’s cottage in the country outside Tracy, California. It had a tiny kitchen, a tiny living room, one bedroom, and one bathroom (and no air conditioning in a place that routinely got triple-digit heat). I slept on a fold-up Army cot in the bedroom with my parents.

I think it was our first Christmas in that house, and my parents had gotten a cheap artificial tree and a dozen blue Christmas balls. Those were the only ornaments we had. So my mother, being the creative problem-solver she was, decided we would make more. We cut up styrofoam meat trays, cardboard, and some other sort of packaging we had lying around, glued bits of eucalyptus to them (California, remember? Not a lot of evergreens where we lived except for juniper), and coated the results in silver spray paint. A Krylon Christmas!

When I describe myself as a California redneck, I’m not lyin’.

At least it was California, so I didn’t have to walk to school in the snow, uphill, both ways.

The last of the blue balls (ho ho ho – I said, “blue balls.” Martha Stewart may not live at my house, but apparently Beavis and Butthead do) broke about 20 years ago, but I still have a few of the Krylon and eucalyptus masterpieces. They don’t have much eucalyptus left–it’s worn off over the last 50 years of loving use–but I still hang them on the Christmas tree every year. Each time I do, I think of my mother, doing the best she could and making something beautiful out of what she had and could afford–and teaching me to do the same.

I’m not poor now. We aren’t rich, but we have what we need and some of what we want, and that is a blessing beyond measure. But the lessons I learned that Christmas, cutting out scraps and gathering bits of eucalyptus, have stuck with me.

• We have the power to create, even in difficult circumstances.
• We have the power to improve our difficult circumstances, even if only a little bit.
• Magic isn’t bought. It’s made, one scrap at a time.
• Beauty is everywhere if you look hard enough.
• My mother was an incredible human being.

I try to remember those lessons each year when I unwrap those ornaments and place them on the tree. And I remember my mother, who made a tough time brighter with some scraps and silver paint.

How about y’all? Do you have a favorite (or funny or interesting) Christmas memory? Drop a comment! I love hearing other people’s stories.

Merry Christmas!