Tracing our Missing Xmas
Dec. 31st, 2012 10:01 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sawylWith the departure of our visitors on the 27th, mater turned her thoughts to Christmases and Christmas excuses past, hitting on a puzzling failure of memory in the process.
Casting her mind back to the 1980s, she remembered an occasion when the Christmas we'd had with my grandmother in Belsize Park. When we arrived on the 24th, we discovered very few preparations had been made — because, mater says, my grandmother claimed to be too old to do it — so the parents were required to dash about in order to get everything before the shops shut. So while she went shopping in the village, my father went to the butcher's where here found the poor man about to shut up shop, having given up on my grandmother coming to collect the turkey she'd ordered. On the day itself, pater did all the cooking and a couple of my aunts came to lunch. The experience was, according to mater, rather glum.
It was obviously also rather traumatic: neither pater nor I could remember a thing about it. My only clear mememories were of Christmases spent with my other set of grandparents, but with a hazy and indistinct memory of a small tree at my granny's place. My sister also thought she remembered it — she says it was the time she first realised that Father Christmas wasn't real, so perhaps that explains her flashbulb recall — but she thought she was older than the rest of us thought she ought to be to accomodate our hypothesis as to which year it had been.
After an initial search of the photo archives came up blank, pater's epic project to scan all our and all our antecedents' photos came up trumps. He hit on a set of pictures probably taken with my camera by my sister, one of which showed us all sitting round the table in Belsize Park wearing paper hats, a Christmas pudding on in front of us and turkey visible behind us on the kitchen counter, and another which showed the tree I remembered, its pot set in a saucepan.
Using the age of my youngest cousin to tweak a couple of our original factors, we were able to determine that the event took place just after my 11th birthday, when my sister would have been eight — in line with her recollection — and my grandmother would have been in her mid-sixties. Thus, if my mother is right, granny's current assertions that she's too old to do anything go back at least 25 years!
Casting her mind back to the 1980s, she remembered an occasion when the Christmas we'd had with my grandmother in Belsize Park. When we arrived on the 24th, we discovered very few preparations had been made — because, mater says, my grandmother claimed to be too old to do it — so the parents were required to dash about in order to get everything before the shops shut. So while she went shopping in the village, my father went to the butcher's where here found the poor man about to shut up shop, having given up on my grandmother coming to collect the turkey she'd ordered. On the day itself, pater did all the cooking and a couple of my aunts came to lunch. The experience was, according to mater, rather glum.
It was obviously also rather traumatic: neither pater nor I could remember a thing about it. My only clear mememories were of Christmases spent with my other set of grandparents, but with a hazy and indistinct memory of a small tree at my granny's place. My sister also thought she remembered it — she says it was the time she first realised that Father Christmas wasn't real, so perhaps that explains her flashbulb recall — but she thought she was older than the rest of us thought she ought to be to accomodate our hypothesis as to which year it had been.
After an initial search of the photo archives came up blank, pater's epic project to scan all our and all our antecedents' photos came up trumps. He hit on a set of pictures probably taken with my camera by my sister, one of which showed us all sitting round the table in Belsize Park wearing paper hats, a Christmas pudding on in front of us and turkey visible behind us on the kitchen counter, and another which showed the tree I remembered, its pot set in a saucepan.
Using the age of my youngest cousin to tweak a couple of our original factors, we were able to determine that the event took place just after my 11th birthday, when my sister would have been eight — in line with her recollection — and my grandmother would have been in her mid-sixties. Thus, if my mother is right, granny's current assertions that she's too old to do anything go back at least 25 years!
