Christmas traditions | Bobbi Ann Johnson Holmes

I turned seventy-one less than two weeks ago. My age and current reflections on the Christmas season influenced the writing of The Ghost and Christmas Magic. I’ve been thinking a lot about the elders in my life who no longer join us around the Christmas tree. Or maybe they are in spirit; I just can’t see them.

When writing The Ghost and Christmas Magic, I thought a lot about family Christmas traditions. In truth, it was a highly personal reflection. Growing up, my Christmas stocking was one of my favorite traditions.

It wasn’t about getting stuff; it was about the love Mom poured into the stocking stuffers. Gift giving was Mom’s love language. She would wrap each tiny stocking gift in Christmas wrapping paper. And every Christmas as my sister and I would eagerly open our stockings, Dad would remind us how he just got oranges and walnuts in his stocking when he was a little boy, and how he had to wait until after Christmas dinner to open gifts. Oh, it wasn’t said in bitterness, but playful teasing—however, it was all true.

On our first Christmas at Havasu Palms, I had just turned fourteen, and my sister was eighteen. Our previous Christmases had been extravagant, with an abundance of gifts—but that year my parents had poured all their money into the new business venture, they had no extra cash, and we understood instead of a mountain of gifts that Christmas, my sister and I could each ask for one thing we wanted. I believe my sister asked for a makeup mirror, and I asked for a sewing box.

That year, my sister’s and my stockings proved to be the most memorable. We were living out in the middle of nowhere—literally. There was nowhere for Mom to go Christmas shopping for stocking stuffers, and Internet shopping was not a thing. And we didn’t even have a real telephone—only an unreliable mobile phone in Dad’s truck, which wasn’t something you could use for catalogue shopping.

Despite the shopping challenge, our stockings were stuffed with tiny, wrapped packages, as they had been for all our previous Christmases. Upon unwrapping the stocking stuffers, we soon discovered where Mom had gone Christmas shopping—Havasu Palms’s little store (I wrote about that store and posted a picture in the previous blog post).

My sister and I found it utterly hilarious. Mom had wrapped candy bars, packets of gum, and cheesy Havasu Palms souvenirs the previous owners of Havasu Palms had stocked in the store. One was a little hula girl that both my sister and I wish we still had. There was also a little metal tin of pain medication (I remember Midol, my sis remembers Bufferin) in each of our stockings—but instead of the pills, they each contained a neatly folded five-dollar bill.

My sister and I agree that the stockings from Christmas 1968 were our favorites, which proves, if gift-giving is your love language, it doesn’t mean it has to cost a lot of money.

This Christmas will be a quiet one for my husband and me. It will be my second Christmas without my mom. It will be over thirty Christmases without my dad. I know some people complain about how the mental load of preparing for Christmas falls on the mother—while the men in the family just show up. But that was not true for my parents or my marriage. And I don’t think that is the case in the marriages of my daughter and son.

My dad was like a big, excited kid at Christmas. I remember him painting Christmas murals on the windows of our first Covina house. (Dad was artistic, like my daughter.) He made his homemade fudge and popcorn during the holidays, oyster stew on Christmas Eve, eggs benedict on Christmas morning, and prepared the turkey and stuffing for Christmas dinner. He and Mom worked side by side in the kitchen. And Dad was usually the one to take my sister and me to buy the Christmas tree.

While Mom was the primary gift shopper, every year Dad would pick out something special for my sister and me—something just from him. His gift for Mom was always last minute and extravagant.

I know our adult children often roll their eyes when we tell stories and reminisce about days gone by. They see it as us living in the past, and they find it especially annoying that we often repeat the same stories.

But the truth is, it’s not about living in the past—it’s about embracing the rich memories of our life, which is especially comforting as we look down the road and understand this journey of ours is coming to its final mile. That doesn’t have to be a sad thing—it’s not if the journey was filled with adventure, memorable experiences, and people we love, even if those people are no longer with us.

Don and I decorated our Christmas tree this morning. Our first Oregon Christmas, back in 2021, we purchased our first real tree in years. Growing up I never understood why anyone would ever buy a fake tree. Plus, I loved how a real pine tree made our house smell.

While our tree in my childhood living room was real, it was also flocked. But Mom let me have my own little green pine tree in my bedroom, where I hung strands of popcorn and added my own decorations.

When I was in high school, I remember being horrified when my then best friend, Karen Witcher, shared with me she had never had a real tree before. I somehow convinced her parents to let her buy a real tree that year, so the two of us went to downtown Lake Havasu City and I helped her buy her first non-artificial Christmas tree and together we decorated it. Years later, when she was an adult and a mother with a young child, she told me she never went back to an artificial tree.

As for me, I switched from a cut tree to an artificial tree in the 1980s a number of years after we moved to the mountain community of Wrightwood, California. While one would assume we would want a real tree being in the mountains, I switched after worrying about fires. Wrightwood is very dry, and we always had fires burning in the fireplace or woodstove. I worried about the safety of my family; plus artificial trees had improved since those tinsel trees of my youth.

Another plus with artificial trees, they are easier to decorate because you can manipulate their limbs. And I have a lot of tree ornaments. In fact, we only ended up using about a third of our tree ornaments this year.

I remember when I received my first Hallmark tree ornament. Don gave it to me for a birthday gift right before our first Christmas as a married couple. That was when I started collecting Christmas ornaments—primarily Hallmark, but not exclusively.

I mentioned we went back to a live tree after moving to Oregon. But what I didn’t tell you, I went back to an artificial tree the next Christmas, much to my son’s disapproval. Scott and SeAnne have a real tree. I’m glad for them, but for me, the artificial tree is easier to decorate—and I don’t have to rush to take it down because it dried out.

Now to the “tears” in the title in my blog post. Decorating the tree this morning involved a few tears. It’s not just because this is my first Christmas without Mom, but bringing out those ornaments stirred some sweet memories.

Those memories involved Scott and Elizabeth when we lived in Wrightwood. Each year when we would bring out the Christmas ornaments, they insisted on taking each one out of the box, inspecting and then playing with them before they went on the tree. I smile fondly at those old memories.

But it’s not just our kids growing up, but our parents moving on. I have no right to feel sad or melancholy, because I’ve spent 70 Christmases on this earth (at least in this lifetime) and most of them have been filled with family, friends, and love. While our parents, grandparents, and aunts and uncles have moved on, they have left behind some wonderful Christmas memories for me to cherish, and because of that, I sometimes shed a few tears.

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