One of my favorite Christmas memories is sitting in the dark, watching the tree lights, with Christmas music in the background. Growing up, it seemed so magical and exciting. I can still recall the feeling I had inside, only at Christmas. We would put our sleeping bags by the Christmas tree and sleep downstairs by it some nights. Of course, not THE night...when it got close to Christmas, we had no desire to sleep by the tree, lest we scare Santa Claus away.
Our tradition was to hang our stockings along the staircase...and we knew Santa had come because he would take down all of the stockings and put each person's stocking by her (or his, for my dad...lol) pile of goodies. We'd sneak down, sometimes in the middle of the night, to check if the stockings were still up. When I discovered the stockings missing, my heart would leap and I would be flooded with excitement and anticipation.
I remember one of the more daring and dramatic Santa Claus occurrences was one year when we went to Midnight Mass. When I was in grade school, the parish still had the Midnight Mass at midnight (it's earlier now). We looked forward to this as kids because we got to stay up late! That year, the stockings were gone when we got home from church! (Events such as these were clear evidence of SC's existence provided to the naysayers at school.)
Speaking of evidence, one year, Santa made an actual appearance, IN PERSON, to Jill and I. We were all sitting in the living room when we heard a knock on the door. Jill and I answered it and there was Santa! He personally delivered our toys that year and we got a picture with him (now there was physical proof!).
One story we like to give Jill shit about is the year she wanted a My Pretty Pony waterfall. She didn't get it when all of the presents were found and she wanted it so badly, I think she started to cry. My parents couldn't take the sight of her disappointment so they told us to check outside and we found the pony waterfall laying in the snowbank by the door. Santa must have dropped it on his way in! It turned out, when my parents were setting out the piles of gifts, they thought the piles were uneven, so they took one of Jill's gifts out to be returned. When they saw how dismayed Jill was, they devised a plan to stage a Santa Claus blunder.
I also have fond memories of driving around Denison, bundled up in the back seat of the car, looking at all of the Christmas lights and singing Christmas carols. The ones with a lot of lights were deemed "lighthouses". Mental notes were made to pay these houses a visit on the drive the following year.
Denison also had an actual little house the town put up every year where we could go see Santa (this also seemed pretty legit when it came to belief...I mean, there was a house!). I remember and we still have a picture of Molly screaming in terror as Santa holds her and poses for a picture. She was 10...just kidding...I think she was two.
My mom would make sugar cookies (let me tell you right now, for the record, I have never tasted a sugar cookie that can match hers) in a bunch of different Christmas shapes and we would all sit down to frost them together. As the tradition progressed, we came up with contests (ugliest, creative and the most recently added "it was good until..." category...see picture) and each person picked cookies s/he had decorated to enter into the contest. We all voted and let me tell you...since we are Aleschs, the contest was always taken very seriously and documented with pictures, for posterity.
There are cookie stories that live in infamy, to this day...like the time I tried to be super creative and stuck a Reese's cup on Santa's cookie sack (my thinking...it was brown, like his bag...brilliantly clever). Turns out, not so much and it gets brought up every time we frost cookies (no one would eat it!). Anne also still takes some very serious ribbing for her cookies as a child...she would pile every decorative bead and sparkle and frosting color on one cookie. Those were always "left for Santa" because they were pretty much inedible!
There are 17 years between Kristen and I, so I felt fortunate that the Christmas magic was extended into my adult life. Santa Claus still came to all of us because Kristen was young. He still took the stockings down and put them by our gifts. And even though I didn't like to get up as early when Kristen found the stockings were gone, I enjoyed the magic that I still felt and the warmth of enjoying that time with my family.
As the years have passed, our Christmases have looked different from year to year. The year Jill was deployed in Afghanistan, we took a soldier nutcracker with us wherever we went and took our picture with it, so she "was there with us" (Kurt Warner even signed it that year at the Fiesta Bowl parade!).
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