Christmas is over (finally) but the memories linger;  the trees and decorations linger as well, but I'll get around to taking them down before long... before Valentine's Day, anyway.  I watched all the littlies cruising around the house soaking up Grandma's magic:  a little group of stuffed snowmen seemingly in a choral frenzy,  a little door in a baseboard that makes them wonder who uses it, a half a dozen nativities in various places and one large nativity under an endtable, trinkets and goo-gahs all over the house, and two Christmas Trees full of ornaments gathered over almost half a century.  We have a tradition that the youngest child puts the little home-made felt star on top of the tree when all the decorating is done.  Since MamieLady does the same thing at her house, Little Hazel was primed to do it here.  I picked her up and picked up the star and she immediately realized what was going on and she grabbed the little star and stretched out to put it in place.  She had a little difficulty at first but figured out you had to hold the bottom open and whomped it right on the top.  Pretty good work for a two-year old.  It replaced my previous favorite star-planting ceremony, the one a few years ago when my twelve-year old youngest daughter (Boogie)  softly pushed me aside and placed the star without being held ...she was getting kinda big anyway.

I guess it is natural to think about past Christmases, especially when you reach a point where there more holidays behind you than there are in front of you.  I have had some very sweet and fun Christmas experiences.  With five kids on an NCO's pay,  our Christmas mornings weren't always lavish affairs, but the kids loved all of our traditions as much as the presents (they told us that!) and we always had a great time.  Well, except for the Christmas I was in DESERT STORM;  we celebrated a couple of weeks early because we knew I would be gone on the day, so things were a tad somber that morning...and the Christmas when I was going to a school in Virginia and my family was all in Germany...or our first Christmas as a couple when I was in Germany and MamaCharlie was waiting for travel orders in California...or the half-a-dozen Christmases or Christmas Eves or New Years Eves or Days when I had some kind of overnight duty or something.  And there were a couple of Christmases when we were traveling instead of being home...but on those occasions we were together.

We spent a number of Christmases in Germany, and we loved it there,  especially when we were at Patch Barracks.   Patch had a small PX and Commissary and a huge Audio-Photo club.  They opened a small Toyland annex for the Christmas season.  For major shopping there was the Robinson Barracks PX  complex which was much larger and had a larger toy annex, plus a food court and German consessionaires set up in the parking lot.  Of course, Germans celebrate Christmas in much the same way as we do so you also have the option of shopping in town.  German toy stores are really something to see.  They  go all out with window displays and toy trains running everywhere and all that.  But we mostly used the PX system for monetary considerations, as they say.

But being on a tight budget didn't keep us from going to the German toy stores to look around.  And the Christkindl Markt sets up every year about late November and closes Christmas Eve.  The Markt has a wealth of smells and sights;  it is full of happy people shopping, eating, drinking and getting ready for Christmas.  The Gluwein (a red wine heated up with spices), the roasted almonds, the bratwursts, schnitzels, pommes frits (french fries), and bier and schnapps and who knows what else send up a sensory overload of sights and smells that are unforgettable.

One day in the Robinson Barracks Toyland, we were just browsing, getting some idea of prices and what was available.  Boogie, our youngest daughter (mentioned above)was about two then.  She spied a stuffed toy monkey and fell in love.  She reached for it and dumb daddy let her hold it because she was soooo cute cuddling the monkey.  It was soft and plushy but it had a plastic face and hands with pointing thumbs and fingers and a hole in his belly-button and mouth and ears.  You could put his finger in his ear and his other thumb in his mouth or you could put both fingers in his ears or any combination.  It really was a cute monkey.   Its name was Doolittle.  Trying to put Doolittle back on the shelf became one of the worst in-store experiences I ever had as a parent.  Boogie wanted that monkey.  She just wasn't going to let it go.  She would not be distracted;  she wouldn't pay any attention to any kind of persuasion.  It took a lot of time and way too much energy to get Doolittle back on his perch.

While MC led Boogie back to the car, I snuck back in and bought Doolittle, feeling foolish because I just knew that come Christmas morning, a month or so away, Boogie would look at the monkey and cruise on by on her way to the rest of the packages.

'Twas the night before Christmas and all through the apartment, not a kid was still stirring...it was about 1 am.  The stockings were hung by the radiator with care and Doolittle hung out of Boogies stocking there....

Christmas morning the kids piled up at the living room door waiting for the lazy parents to get up and allow them to enter that magic realm.  We let them in and they naturally rushed to sort out the stockings first.  Boogie saw Doolittle half in her stocking, his upper body sticking out and his thumb in his mouth.  Surprisingly, there was no rush to the radiator, she walked slowly with eyes wide in disbelief.  She carefully lifted Doolittle out of the stocking and pulled him into a tight hug, like welcoming home a long lost friend.  For Boogie, Christmas was over.  She walked around ignoring all the other activities, holding her monkey in tight embrace;  she was never going to let that monkey out of her grasp again.  Even when we finally got her to sit down and open her other presents, she kept in contact with Doolittle the whole time.  I am sure she couldn't tell you what else she got that year but honestly, neither could I... none of us ever forgot the morning that Boogie got her monkey. 

I know that parents make mistakes and we affect our kids in ways we cannot fathom.  We don't remember the same incidents the same way;  we often forget the things that are most important to them and count as very important things that escape them completely.   But every now and then you do something right, something absolutely right.  That Christmas morning was one of those times.