New Year's Day

For us, when we were growing up, New Year’s Day marked the end of the Christmas season. There are twelve days of Christmas, as the song goes, and those days are counted from Christmas Day through Three Kings Day, or Epiphany, on January 6. When I was in my own home, I followed my grandparents’ tradition and did not take down Christmas decorations nor consider Christmas to to “over” until January 6. But not so with my mother. New Year’s Day was the end of Christmas in her eyes.

In the morning of New Year’s Day, after we came home from church (New Year’s Day is a Holy Day of Obligation when Catholics must attend Mass), we would watch the Tournament of Roses Parade from Orange County, California. All the floats in this 2-3 hour parade were constructed completely out of natural materials: flowers, petals, grass, seeds, bark, etc. All the surfaces had to be covered with these materials and with no other types of materials. People worked for month to built these floats and glue on all those tiny materials. It is a spectacular parade if you have never seen it. There were also marching bands and dancers, and I always enjoyed the equestrian contingents, especially the charros (Mexican cowboys and cowgirls) and the Palomino horses. I don’t know why I remember tthe Palominos so well, but I do.

After the Parade, the college football bowl games would begin, and there was nothing else on television except football. Since I was not terribly interested in football at that time, I usually read one of the books I had received for Christmas. I always received books, and I was especially thrilled if I received a Nancy Drew mystery, as I exchanged them with my good friend Deborah. We were both huge Nancy Drew fans, and I still remember the hours of pleasure those books gave me. My parents also began to give me the Cherry Ames mystery series, which got me interested in nursing, and I considered becoming a Navy nurse at one time during high school. Cherry Ames was a nursing student, who then became a nurse in various capacities and solved mysteries. The key line in the stories was that the hospital director always told Cherry to wipe the rouge off her face, but she had no rouge, only naturally rosy cheeks.

Sometime in the afternoon, my mother would start badgering us to take our Christmas presents up to our rooms, since until that time they were still in the piles under the tree. I  usually had also received a diary for Christmas and I looked forward to writing in it on the first day of the New Year. Unfortunately, I never had anything really exciting to write about.

Toward the end of the afternoon, my mother would often make a pizza and mini barbecued hotdogs for us to eat as we watched the football games. She often brought out a cheese ball made of bleu cheese and cheddar cheese and covered with walnuts, which we ate with crackers. Sometimes there was so left-over sparkling grape juice or apple juice to help the celebration.

After we went back to school the day after New Year’s Day (unless it was on a Friday or Saturday), my mother took down and packed away all the Christmas decorations. She took the Christmas tree out into the woods and there it stayed, lonely and bare, a memory of another Christmas.