**GRIOT** Holidays and Such

** I purposely scheduled this one to post today. Today would have been my mother's birthday. **

I was in a semi-Scrooge mood all this holiday season. Holidays bring up a lot of memories of people no longer here. That makes me melancholy. The holidays are also for families. That's beautiful. But I get so bothered by people elevating holidays above all the other days of the year.

My mother loved Thanksgiving and Christmas because that's when she had all her kids and grandkids around her. Actually, Mom loved having her house full of family and friends all the time. For that reason, Thanksgiving was more of just a slightly larger get-together kind of thing at Mom's house. Mom and some of the old-enough-to-cook females would start prepping the day before. That was nice, all the ladies - Mom, my sister, some family friends - all sitting around chopping opinions, soaking the turkey, and maybe having a small glass of wine while we worked. Thanksgiving day is when the guys and kids would come around. My mother loved feeding people so we always made up plates beforehand for anyone who was missing out because of working or being sick or whatever.  The house would be hot and happy, smelling of turkey and dressing. You couldn't hear yourself think a quiet thought because... my family is loud. There were so many of us that at one time, we had over 40 people at Mom's house.

Thanksgiving was good, but Christmas...  that was Mama's jam. It wasn't about giving or getting gifts so much as it was about having her "babies"  back in the house - including we grown women and our six-foot-plus brothers. If my mom loved you, you were one of her kids.

So, I have to tell you about Mom and her possessiveness when it came to decorating the tree. There was tradition and rules when it came to decorating for Christmas and, well traditions for everything about the holiday:

• The tree and other decorations would NEVER be put up until after Thanksgiving. Mama felt that people were too eager to get on with "gift-mas" before they had properly reflected on being thankful. 
• The last tree Mama decorated had to last at least 15 years. I'm not kidding. By the time I was 30 years old, I'd only known Mama to have owned 3 trees. We never had a real tree. We always owned one of those artificial things - but it had to be green. Anything else was just "not right".We only replaced one of them after it was damaged during one of our military moves across the country.
• The tree would be brought up from wherever it was stored on a day or two after Thanksgiving.
• Only Mama was allowed to decorate the tree. The rest of us could hand her the ornaments and other stuff, but she was the only one who could actually hang anything on a branch.
• Once the tree was decorated, the rest of us were allowed to put gifts underneath - but only with Mom's supervision.
• If anyone touched a single thing on that tree, Mama knew. Just for a joke, after Mom had gone to bed, I once switched a couple of ornaments because my sister dared me. (And I don't mean that we were little kids. I was probably about 25, which would have made my sister Mike 35.) The next day, Mom was walking past the tree into the kitchen to make coffee. She got a foot into the kitchen, then turned around. She looked at that tree for about 4 seconds before she found what was out of place. I had moved the ornaments and didn't remember what was out of place!
• As far as gift wrapping, Mama was world-class. She wrapped gifts so beautifully, it was almost a shame to open them. 
• Funniest (and fun-nest) thing about Mama and gifts. She wanted to see the kids rip their open with glee, but she took almost half an hour to open each one of hers. First, she had to make sure to give the gifter a smile before she even started, then... She would peel each piece of tape off like the paper was priceless and irreplaceable. Then, she made sure not to crumple any of the ribbons or bows. Before she could relax enough to actually unbox a gift, she had to know that the designated person (and there really always was one) was folding the wrapping paper and putting the bows away for later. You could go to the store and buy more paper and bows and be back before Mama actually saw the gift. And when she did, she would be so happy. If one of the grandkids gave her a bag of candy or a single hairpin, she would be as happy as if the President had just draped a medal around her neck. She was sincerely happy too. I remember Mama taking to work some tacky little gift one of her grandkids got her and showing it off like she had a brand new mink...
• The tree only stayed up for about 3 or 4 days after Christmas. New Year's was coming and mom had to get the ornaments wrapped and put away for the next December. She wanted her tree down and stored before the 31st when she would be up at night, making her black-eyed peas and making sure a boy was the first one across the threshold on the new year.

Some of you had the tradition of eating black-eyed peas for the new year. I have no idea where that countrified tradition came from and I don't even like black-eyed peas that much, but I still want some on New Year's. (And, I just found this explaining the tradition. I can't get down with the spiritual aspect, but now I know.)

I also have no idea why some people insist that a male be the first to cross the threshold of a house in the new year. (I just found this and this and learned that the tradition is just a Southern or "black" thing...) My mom used to make us take one of the grandboys out and send him back in. I am not kidding. If someone knocked on our door before that happened, Mama would make them wait to make sure it was a male. People coming to our house rarely knocked; they usually just called out a Hello and walked on in. If that happened, my mother would move like Flash and block the entry of a woman. The visitor would have to wait until we did the right thin. I guess this is why we usually did the walking a boy child into the house right after we had given all the New Year kisses. (Or so I thought.)

This year, I spent Christmas and New Year home alone staying warm and calm. I thought about Mama and all her old country ways. And I was hoping that people everywhere were making their own traditions.

Now that the holidays are out of the way, I just hope that people look forward to every day with the excitement and gratitude and intentions to be more kind and peaceful and motivated that they do for those other days. 

Love your lover like it's always Valentine's. Don't wait for November to think about being grateful. Be good to each other as if they might not be here tomorrow. Be as good to yourself as you want others to be. Love a lot, laugh at lot, pray a lot, be a peace-maker, be a helper, be a better friend, sibling, parent, neighbor.

Peace

--Free

This song seems appropriate. I don't believe in a lot of that emotional-only Holiness church stuff, but this song is beautiful