I was an only child, so Christmas at my grandmother’s house felt special because there were so many people there. My grandmother had 4 children, and 4 grandchildren, and all those people seemed like a huge family to me. I was the oldest grandchild, so I always got to give out all the gifts. They were placed under the tree, and I would pick up each one, read who it was for, and take them their gift. This was a very important job for an eight year old and I relished it.
My grandmother made a turkey that year and everyone sat at the dining table and enjoyed Christmas dinner. My three cousins and I kept eating it and eating it. We finished that turkey after everyone else had finished dinner. My grandfather always gave us a box of chocolate covered cherries every year, and we also ate a lot of those chocolates. We were feeling pretty stuffed. All four grandchildren were spending the night at my grandmother’s house that Christmas after everyone else went home. We played with our new toys all night too. My dad had bought me a microscope, and we looked at everything we could think of that fit under that microscope. My cousin, Cheryl, had received new Barbie doll accessories, and we played Barbie dolls for a while too. She could really carry on conversations with those Barbie dolls. She had a real gift of gab. There was a song out that year called “Yackity Yack” and I played the record over and over again telling her that was her, that she talked too much, yackity yack. She ended up crying and my grandmother told me to stop that. I eventually told her I was sorry and we got back to playing. My other two cousins, Paul and Eddie, received skates, and we also skated for a while. Then my grandmother made biscuits for us all and we kept eating and eating them. My grandmother told us we would have “biscuits popping out of our ears”. We thought that was so funny, the four of us laughed and laughed over her telling us that.
As an adult, I had an only child too, so it is still special to remember those big family get-togethers at my grandmother’s house when I was a child.