Christmas memories

Since Six Geese a-Slaying, my most recent book, is a Christmas mystery, while I was writing it I spent a lot of time thinking about my own Christmas memories. (Translation: "Help!  I need Christmas stuff, quick!  Let’s cannibalize everything I can think of from my own past holidays.")

I used the memory of my worst Christmas experience ever—sadist that I am, I inflicted it on Meg’s nephew, Eric.  You’ll have to read the book to hear that one. But most of my Christmas memories didn’t fit into the book at all, so I thought I’d share a couple of them here.

Take the Christmas when I didn’t get a Barbie.  All of my friends either had Barbies or were getting them for Christmas. I put in my request for a Barbie and approached the presents on Christmas morning, secure in the knowledge that Santa would come through.

Santa blew it.  Instead of a Barbie, I got some off-brand fashion doll.  She didn’t have the rather sultry, pouty look of the early Barbie dolls—I seem to recall that she had more of a baby face. She certainly didn’t have Barbie’s figure—she was shorter and plumper, with a larger head than Barbie. Heck, she probably had a more realistic figure, one less prone to inspiring anorexia. Presumably she had a wardrobe, but the only outfit I remember her wearing was a bridal gown, which had limited appeal to a tomboy like me.

In fact, apart from peer pressure, it’s hard to imagine why I wanted a Barbie doll to begin with. I don’t recall playing that much with doll. But once I finally had a Barbie doll—probably the following Christmas—I quickly found ways to have fun with her and her ever-growing family of friends and relatives—Skipper, Midge, Ken, a new Barbie with bendable legs—the whole Barbie clan.

I just never seemed to be doing what Mattel expected little girls to be doing with Barbie.  No fashion shows, no school dances, no dates.  My Barbies led a much more adventurous life. Mounted on Breyer horses they conducted adventurous guerilla warfare across the floor of my room, battling an evil oppressor—I’d been watching "The Scarecrow of Romney Marsh" and "The Swamp Fox" on Disney.  "Swiss Family Robinson" inspired me to shipwreck them on a desert island in the middle of my room, where they built tree houses, raised crops, and made all their tools and household implements out of twigs.  They put in their time as slightly oversized Borrowers after I read the books by Mary Norton.  Sometimes they roamed about in a paper towel box converted into a gypsy caravan—pulled, of course, by the Breyer horses.  They often gave plays—usually Shakespearean comedies, though I was greatly hampered by the fact that I only had the one Ken doll, and Shakespeare didn’t write many female parts.

And more often than anything else, they were detectives and solved mysteries. The mysteries were more inspired by the Hardy Boys than Agatha Christie, and often featured buried treasures and sinister prowlers.  And in my scenarios, Barbie had her nemesis . . . her arch-enemy . . . indeed, her Moriarty. 

Remember the off-brand fashion doll I found under the tree on that unfortunate Christmas?  Apparently I never forgave her for not being Barbie, so once I did have a Barbie, I cast not-Barbie in the recurring role of a villainess called the Lady in White.  Clad in her increasingly tattered white wedding gown, she haunted the edges of my Barbie games like some odd amalgam of Miss Haversham and the Wicked Witch of the West.

So in the end, even my Barbieless Christmas turned out okay. You can’t have an adventure without a villain, right?

More recently, we had the Christmas when we decorated the tree fifteen or twenty times. The whole family came to my house that year, and before my nephews, then two, arrived, I made sure to have the tree all decorated for their delight.  I’d gone to a great deal of trouble to get enough plastic decorations to make sure the tree was safe, largely by buying lots of vintage metallic-colored plastic ornaments on eBay.

The boys were dazzled, all right.  They both made a beeline for the tree and began quickly and methodically undecorating it.  Within an hour, the tree was naked as far up as they could reach.  When they went down for their naps, we redecorated the tree, thinking perhaps they’d exhausted their undecorating energy.  As soon as they woke up, they began the enthralling project of denuding the tree again.

We went through this routine twice a day the whole time they were there.  We’re a little short on impressive tree pictures from that year, but everyone had a lot of fun.

Okay, the year of not-Barbie probably won’t fit into Meg’s world, but maybe I can use that undecorating thing one of these years.