Love Cruikshank, Love notes

This is the last column I shall write before Christmas to come. I hope your holiday will live up to your highest expectations and will be long remembered as one of the best you’ve ever had.

It has always been a mystery to me that with a large, argumentative and set-in-their-ways sort of clan our holidays were so happily harmonious. Probably because my great-grandmother was usually elsewhere. I tell you, she was a tough one.

Talking to a friend who spent last weekend with me, I was interested in hearing that she always gave identical presents to her mother and mother-in-law. For that matter she sent them each year identical birthday cards.

&8220;Only way to go,&8221; she said. “They compared and I didn’t ask for trouble.”

My birthday is a December one so it was a special sort of month for me. On my seventh birthday, my golden birthday, I received a big beautiful doll buggy. Until that time I’d had no vehicle big enough to transport the big doll I’d received on my sixth birthday.

The little girl across the alley, only a month older than I, got a big beautiful doll buggy for Christmas. So it was quite natural that we would spend a part of Christmas afternoon taking our doll children for a walk.

I loved Christmas wreaths on doors, still do. But my mother didn’t like them. A small decent wreath in the window, sometimes with a candle in it if you were careful to keep it in sight when lighted. Fine. But no door wreaths. Mother called them “hatchments.”

I looked that word up to make sure it didn’t have an “e” after the “t” and was amazed to find only one meaning for it.

“The armorial bearings of a deceased person. So blazoned as to indicate the rank, sex, etc.”

Now in our town, and I don’t think it was peculiar to our town in that era, a hatchment also meant the ornament, flowers and ribbon placed at the door, to indicate a death in the family. It was put up upon the death of the relative and left up until after the funeral.

I think the custom gradually died out as I grew away from childhood, but it was a custom well established in my mind and in the minds of my friends while we were children.

A good many people felt the same way about Christmas wreaths on the door as my mother did. There was no real resemblance, though, between the two. The funeral hatchment was rarely if ever round. The flowers attached to the ribbon were usually cream-colored, the ribbon was black, brown or bronze. If the ornament signified the death of a baby or young child, of course, the ribbon and the rosebuds were white.

Wheeling our dolls throughout the neighborhood, Louise and I &045; who both knew full well the difference between a wreath and a hatchment &045; tormented each other by insisting that the wreaths indicated death. A friend here, a beloved playmate there. We were practically in tears by time we got home. Most miserable Christmas I can remember, and though Dickens’ “Christmas Carol” has been part of my Christmas celebration for untold years there are parts of it that bring back that awful Christmas walk.

I have grown more sensible now and stay in on Christmas Day, warm and cozy with a good book and, with any luck, a box of really good chocolates.

I stay up late on Christmas Eve, listening to Christmas church services and music. I didn’t ever believe in Santa Claus, but I loved stories and poems about him as I loved stories about the little people and fairy godmothers.

I remember once having a role in a play at the University, titled I believe, “The Slave With Two Faces.&8221; For the most part my celebrations have been happy ones, but I make it a rule not to do much looking back.

After all, who wants to turn into a pillar of salt?

(Love Cruikshank is an Albert Lea resident. Her column runs Thursday.)