The Christmas Pajamas

It's very nearly Christmas! At least it's the time of year many of us are getting ready for Christmas. Christmas shopping, decorating, singing, giving and traditions. Ever wonder where your Christmas traditions came from? I don't mean general things like putting up lights or a Christmas Tree or stockings although if you came from a home that put lights up on your house, you probably put them up as part of your decorating and Christmas celebrating. What I really mean are other things that might be a more personal family tradition like molasses cookies, acting out the nativity, lighting a candle for every day in December before Christmas, listening to Christmas music (or collecting Christmas music-like me), collecting nutcrackers (like my dad), a 12 days of Christmas service project...the list could go on and on. One thing my brother (Eric) and I did (maybe mostly me) was to turn out all the lights except for the Christmas lights on the tree and where ever else they might be in the room and turn up the Christmas albums and dance and act them out. I think that's why I love Christmas music so much and have made it a hobby to collect Christmas music. I think that we have traditions that we may not even know why we have them. That's one of the fun things about learning our family history...we can see how it might connect to us today!

This memory about Freda is from Aunt Avis (Carl's wife):

Do you remember the pajamas she made every Christmas for all her grandkids?  She used to buy a bolt of flannel fabric and make each and every one of them a new pair of pajamas every year.  I am thinking there were close to 20 the last year that she did this.  She cut out and sewed every pair herself but she hated wrapping packages so she would call me and I would go and wrap the packages for her.  There would be all those pairs of pajamas laid out on the little bed in the room off the kitchen.  All of them alike but many different sizes.  I will never know how she knew what size to make for who, but a lot of those kids were around the same age so that probably helped.  And she would get all these packages ready to mail and we would take them to the Post Office.  Also included in these packages was the best divinity I have ever tasted.  She could really make that like a professional (which I guess she really was.)  She would make batch after batch and drop it on cookie sheets by the tablespoonful and set it in the little room to “cure.”  There was always a box of it to put in the Christmas package for each family.  She also hated to decorate the Christmas tree they always had in their living room so Greg, Kris and I would go over to their house (we only lived about 2 blocks away from them in Hampton) and decorate the tree.  She liked those foil icicles and they were always the last things put on the tree.  And we had to separate them one by one and hang them that way.  Always looked beautiful after it was all done too except for one year.  The tree had been up and decorated for a couple of days and when they got up that next morning all the needles had fallen off and were on the floor and it hadn’t made it to Christmas Day.  So Johnny went and got another tree and we did it all over again.  I think Satch might remember that because he was home for that Christmas.

I don't remember any of the pajamas tradition and neither did my father, but my dad was the youngest child of Alfreda's, so maybe she had stopped doing it by the time he had a family. It's funny, though, we got pajamas for Christmas every year when I was growing up and I think we talked our parents into letting us open them on Christmas Eve...my children got pajamas every year and talked us into letting them open them up on Christmas Eve. Eerie. Now we're into matching pajamas...go figure! Look for pictures of us on Facebook!

As far as the tree goes, my dad remembered that and he said they kept hearing a whoosh sound and they couldn't figure it out until they realized the needles had fallen off the trees and that was the sound they heard!

Do you have any pictures of yourself in Grandma's pajamas? If you do, post it on our cousins page on Facebook. Do you have Grandma's recipe for divinity? Help the rest of us out! Share the recipe. I've never made divinity, but I'd love to try it since it was Grandma's!

Thanks, Avis for the memory!

Next time: more memories! I'm wishing more and more that I had known my Grandmother better and that I had been a better granddaughter.