Chanukah Traditions

T'is the season and all that, or close enough, so this reposting is almost timely.

I've been thinking about the Shelly Family Chanukah traditions.

Our traditions are effectively dead now. My father and I agreed to no longer exchange gifts for birthdays and Chanukah and my sister agreed to the same (hubby and I will still give her children presents). After all, gift-giving when you're in your 50s, as I am, kind of loses meaning, especially when it becomes more chore than fun. I love shopping for my closest friends. I love finding things I know they'll love. But my family? We'd slowly gotten to the point where we were exchanging gift cards and that just seemed silly.

The traditions started to lose steam after my mother died and my father remarried. His new wife and her three daughters had their own traditions. So we'd gather for the family Chanukah party with all the gifts piled up and someone would then hand them out, usually one of the 9 kids (not mine, because hubby and I don't have any) once they were old enough for the responsibility. A gift orgy ensued with wrapping paper flying around the den.

I always held the gifts I was giving to my father, sister, stepmother, nice, and nephew aside and after the feeding frenzy at the gift trough, I gave my father and stepmother their gifts, then found time alone with my sister and her kids (our hubbies usually made themselves scarce) and we exchanged gifts.

That's how we used to do it. Me, my sister (3 years younger than I am), our mother and father, gathered in the den, each with our bags of brightly wrapped presents to give out, one at a time. It wasn't as much about the gifts as it was about the giving, me to you, you to me. My mother would carefully remove the paper from the boxes and fold it neatly for future reuse, to be stored in a bag on a shelf in the garage.

My mother was a sneaky sort, too. Pre-giving traditions included my sister checking out the house to find where all the gifts were hidden, then showing me what she'd find. She was also and still is a whiz when it comes to picking up a box and guessing what's inside. She's hard to fool. Not that my mother didn't try.

Sometimes, my mother got sneaky with the giving. One year, when I must've been 7 or 8, she snuck our gifts into our bedrooms, not aware I was awake and pretending to be asleep (I confided this to her years later). And so, after she was done and in bed, herself, I got up and played with the Tiny Tears Doll with Playpen and fingered the keys of my Eminee Organ, then pretended to be surprised by them magically having appeared in my room when I woke up.

The best, though, was the money she would hide in the gifts. I can still picture the night, when my sister was in her mid-teens, and we were opening gifts in the kitchen. She was trying on her new bathrobe and a twenty dollar bill went flying out of a sleeve. There was another in a pocket. And I had to admire Mom's skill in steam opening a box of Mallomars (our favorite cookie), slipping a couple of twenties inside, then resealing the box so there was no hint it had been opened already. To say I was surprised when I opened it would be an understatement.

She died 23 years ago. The holidays just haven't been the same after that.

Feeling:

Chanukah