My first Christmas memory is of shrieking and running across the room to my new walking doll.  The grownups told me to stand back to back with her, and declared that she was taller.  I am not sure if it was that year or the one after that I asked, “If Christmas is Jesus’ birthday, why do the chidren get the presents and not him?” The question was born not so much out of generosity as logic.  I thought one might visit Jesus, if not by station wagon by airplane, carrying packages wrapped in Rudolph paper.  It didn’t make sense that we would sit around and play with his toys.

In four-year-old kindergarten, the girls were supposed to wear white dresses and be angels.  My mother said I had a light blue dress — could I wear that? I stood out, a tiny blue angel in a sea of white ones.  We sang our carols, and Santa gave me an orange before I took the slow two-feet-to-a-step climb off the stage. By five-year-old kindergarten, I had grown into a mostly white hand-me-down dress with a sash that I thought should be tied in front where I could see it.  The climb down off a stage was still slow, and the days of Advent interminable…

And then how the years sped. I’m not sure at what point, my thirteen-year-old year, that my mother said she couldn’t manage Christmas or my aunt said she would do it.  My aunt mailed the packages before Christmas, but they arrived a week late, all wrapped up and carefully selected for the little girl I still was: a dress, girls’ size 12, a small satin jewelry box, a Monopoly set like I liked playing when I stayed at her house, a jigsaw puzzle of Kentucky.  I thought it would be fun that year if I filled a stocking for my brother and he filled one for me.  It was something I did diligently and he did not.  After that year, I never again hung a stocking — or filled one.

My brother learned how to fill one, though, down the line.  He learned a number of things he hadn’t been taught: He learned to be a hands on dad. He learned that if you’re going to go in business, it’s best not to borrow everything you have and some you borrow, that it’s better to put the children in daycare than in the back booth of a restaurant. (And he learned to be Catholic, which might have been a condition for getting married and becoming a dad in the first place.)

There are little girl Christmases now in Arizona:  The elder is seven, the younger, three.  They’re both autumn babies, so Chelsea is in first grade and Callee won’t start kindergarten for another three years.  I’ll send my brother an email and tell him that the  small packages will probably arrive late, but on Squidoo I have recordings of “The Velveteen Rabbit”, “The Birds’ Christmas Carol” and “Twas the Night Before Christmas”.  I will tell him there are Christmas paper dolls, too, to print for Chelsea.   A girly girl, she sleeps in a sleigh bed in a pink room lined with stuffed animals. Her sister has probably graduated from her crib but is not so much bigger than a walking doll, and just old enough to think you get to Jesus by Alaska Air.

© 2010, karen. All rights reserved.

“To have an old friend visit from far away – what a delight!” What if that old friend was you? The quote just mentioned is from the introduction to Natalie Goldberg’s book, “Old Friend from Far Away: The Practice of Writing Memoir.” It was a birthday present from a dear friend and I thought it would provide good fodder for a memoir writing group on Extreme Writing Now.

Goldberg also writes that “there is nothing stiff about memoir.” It is not a chronological listing of facts about your life; it is rather those memories that affected your senses and are still present somewhere in you – the smell of the swimming pool, bologna sandwiches made by Grandma, an old tune your mother used to hum. It’s about successes and failures and the emotions underlying them.

For me personally, many memories are vague. I need all the help I can get to bring those memories to the surface. Another book called “Writing the Mind Alive” taught me about proprioceptive writing or tapping into the emotions that are still being held in our bodies. This was fascinating stuff and I have done several exercises with this kind of writing. See my Squidoo lens – Proprioceptive Writing – to find out more.

Each week (or maybe more) I will post an exercise from the book to get you writing. If you want to share your writing, great. If not, that’s okay too. Maybe you just want to share what the experience was like. We don’t have to tell our deepest, darkest secrets to the world, but I know I could share how I used to pick a tomato fresh off the vine, give it a lick, and throw some salt on the wet spot, and then eat it like an apple. To me, this was heaven. So, if this sounds interesting to you, please join in.

At the end of her introduction, Natalie Goldberg says, “Let’s pick up the pen, and kick some ass.”

© 2010, kimmanleyort. All rights reserved.