A Toast To The Holidays

Many holiday seasons ago, when the lovely chocolate brown shade of my hair was not the result of a chemical formula, my younger brother and I (and sometimes my older brother) wouldn’t get home from our respective colleges until only a few days before Christmas. As we’d been too busy rushing between exams, study sessions and celebrating to buy any presents for our family members (as if there were any decent stores within walking distance of either of our campuses), we had no choice but to resort to the classic Christmas Blitz at our hometown mall. (Back before the internet, kids, we actually had to go to stores to buy gifts.)

And being part of a large blended family, holidays were a little more challenging. Usually, we’d land at Dad’s (closer to the mall), do the shopping, then wrap Mom’s gifts and go to her house for Christmas Eve Dinner (an awesome paella). Then, very late, we’d pile into someone’s car and go back to Dad’s. Gladys knew that one, everyone in their household would be asleep by the time we finished visiting, drinking our wine, having dessert and exchanging presents, and two, that we probably hadn’t wrapped the rest of our gifts. She was always nice enough to leave the wrapping paper, tape, scissors and assorted gift-adorning paraphernalia out on the table (probably so we wouldn’t wake anyone up by rummaging through the closets). And we’d take it all, with our unwrapped gifts, downstairs to my brother’s “old” bedroom, and wrap ourselves silly while watching some holiday-themed program on his small TV (could have been the Three Stooges, but my memory is hazy, and really, did it matter?).

I forget how this tradition started, and where the original bottle came from, but one year I accompanied our “wrap” session with a little Amaretto, toasting the end of another semester and the three weeks of nothing that lay before us. I don’t know about my brothers, but for me, Amaretto always meant Christmas, and time to wrap gifts and take life a little easier.

I continued the tradition well after college.

On my own for the first time, I could only afford the generic stuff. It was horrible, and tasted faintly of lighter fluid (don’t ask me how I know what lighter fluid tastes like). As soon as it dawned on me that the extra couple of bucks wouldn’t make a real difference to my life, I relegated that nasty bottle to the back of the closet, meaning to use it for, say, pancake batter or French toast or stripping furniture, and treated myself the genuine article. Husband, before he was Husband, had something to say about my little vice, but I assured him that I wasn’t going to become an alcoholic having a shot or two in my coffee while I wrapped Christmas presents.

And when we moved into our own house and I had the wherewithal for the real Amaretto and a mountain of gifts, I’d put on the Vince Guaraldi “Charlie Brown Christmas” soundtrack, brew a pot of high-quality decaf, add my shot and wrap the night away.

Now that alcohol and I have parted ways for the foreseeable future, I put a bit of almond extract in my coffee and tell myself it’s the real thing. I can live with that. It’s just a tradition that reminds me of that particular “snow globe” moment. As we started living farther apart and having spouses and children and jobs and other places to be, Amaretto reminds me of those frenetic but simpler times, when my brothers and I would reunite after months apart, and the time we spent together was fun, and easy, because we were young and thought that our lives would be fun and easy forever. It reminds me of the days when someone left out the wrapping paper for us and Christmas was more than just an excuse to eat cookies and exchange gifts but a time for family, and a celebration of all of us being in the same place at the same moment.

No matter where we wind up, no matter how far-flung we get, I hope there will always be a time, and a place, where we can all be together, even if it’s just for a few hours, even if the pile of presents is smaller than it used to be. I’ll still be a bit nostalgic for those old times, when we were a younger family with fewer places to go.

But I’ll still have my Amaretto. Even if it’s just almond extract in a cup of decaf.