Recapturing Christmas 2009 Memories

After 10 years of marriage two years ago did Christophe finally and successfully rub off some Christmas spirit on me. Brought up in a traditional non-Christian Chinese family, we never celebrated Christmas. To us, 25 December is just a public holiday where the lights are beautifully lit along the roads of Orchard Road, with many shopping malls competing for the best Christmas decoration award. We would, in some years, take a trip downtown and join the locals and tourists alike, to be awed by the fairy-tale like decorations with larger than life size reindeer, snowman, santa claus and christmas trees.

We also did not practise the exchanging of presents, much less the baking of Christmas cookies, even though the cake shops in Singapore sell Christmas log cakes, of which we never patronised too. Interestingly, Christophe said Christmas log cakes are unheard of in Germany.

So it can be easily concluded that we never had a Christmas tree at home for the occasion, therefore no experience of decorating it. Even if we did get one, it would be a plastic, dismantle-able one so we could stash it under the bed or on top of a cupboard when the season is over. Naturally, we never knew the scent of a real Christmas tree.

In the last few years before 2008, our Christmas celebration mainly comprised of a slightly more elaborate dinner and exchanging of presents. Weirdly, we did not have roasted turkey (well, it isn't a tradition for the Germans to have turkey anyway). We had crabs! It slowly became a habit to have crabs for Christmas in our Singapore days. Christophe would cook chilli crab and black pepper crab, I would say, they are even better than those at the seafood restaurants along East Coast!

The biggest and most pleasant thing then, about Christmas, for me, was to have a real Christmas tree at home. And usually, Christophe would buy the tallest and bushiest one back. The sweat of transporting and erecting the tree is so worth it because the sweet scent that the tree gives out is so fresh, how could I best describe it? It smells like the alps - mint, ginger, nutmeg, pine... like Christophe would put it, "THIS, is the smell of Christmas!". I could literally see him returning to his childhood memories, mentally bathing in his thick Christmasy culture. His joy is internal, his happiness could be felt from his heart.

But that is not all, he would decorate the tree with the Christmas decorations, lights and all. The The beauty of a tastefully decorated and well-lit tree in a house brings about a great sense of peace, joy and hope. Later on, when our children multiplied and got older, they became the ones decorating the tree.

Each passing Christmas became more and more celebrated. Especially the last 2 Christmases. In 2008, I toyed with the idea of baking Christmas cookies and gingerbread man! It was perfect timing when my sissy Zoe was there! Her extra pair of hands helped not only in wrapping the christmas presents, but also baking and decorating so many cookies! We played Alexandra Burke's Hallelujah all night long, had roasted chicken, sinful chocolate desserts, took Christmas themed photographs and opened the presents. She also taught the boys the song, Last Christmas, and they never stopped singing it since.

Last Christmas marked yet another milestone for us. I sewed the Advent Calendar. It is a special calendar which is used to count or celebrate the days of Advent in anticipation of Christmas. I made the calendar for my children, everyday, starting from the 1st of December, till the 24th, they would open a little pouch, of which it would contain something sweet like chocolates or a small toy. The Advent Calendar is the reason of this blog post. I hadn't been able to post them then, but I would still like to do it. However, I am back dating the posts to last December as it makes better sense there. So, please check back my December 2009 posts if you are curious. As soon as the advent calendar was hung up, my kids were so eager to get up early every morning just to open one pouch a day! It really makes the counting down to Christmas especially exciting and definitely adds more meaning to the special festivity!