Rachel Gibson revisits ghosts of Christmas past

Hello to everyone at Running With Quills and thanks to Susan for inviting me to blog with you all. Since it is December, I thought maybe I’d write a little bit about Christmas.

Like a lot of people, Christmas is my favorite time of the year. I just love everything about it. The crowds, the snow, the shopping frenzy. But I’ve noticed that the older I get, the more nostalgic I become. I find myself thinking about Christmases as a child. About the time I got to be a sheep in my second grade play. I wore fishnet stockings, white go-go boots and a paper costume with cotton balls glued all over it. Man, I thought I was sizzling hot.

I remember my grandparent’s house and walking in the door on Christmas day. I recall the heat on my cold cheeks and the wonderful smells of turkey and ham. Every year my grandparents gave me three dollars in a pair of new socks. Why the socks? Who knows, but the last year my grandmother was alive, she’d figured in inflation and I got five bucks in my pair of socks. I was thirty.

The Christmas that has to be my most memorable, was when I was in the fourth grade. That year I wanted a tape recorder in the worst way. I fussed and fretted and I may have even gone to The Bon and asked Santa, although by that time I was no longer a believer. But to my sheer delight, all that fretting and fussing and subterfuge paid off. I got a small reel to reel tape recorder, and I spent probably the next year recoding just about everything and filled up about six reels. At some point I got bored with it and shoved it in the back of a closet, never to be seen or heard again. . . or so I thought.

Last year when I opened a Christmas present from my mother, nestled in white tissue paper, sat that old reel to reel. I turned it on and it still worked. After I got home that night and was by myself, I turned it on again and listened to the “Rachel’s Spooky Story” tape. Next was a painful tape devoted to me singing my favorite songs, including The Candy Man by Sammy Davis Jr. and I Think I Love You, by David Cassidy. And I must have thought my brothers were the height of hilarity because I’d devoted a lot of embarrassing tape to them pulling each other’s fingers.

Now, all these years later, I am happy to say that my story telling ability has improved. Sadly, my singing voice has not–which doesn’t keep me from singing anymore now than it did then. And I am vastly relieved that my sense of humor has risen out of grade school, and I no longer find potty humor side splitting and hilarious.

Listening to those old tapes was funny, painful and embarrassing, and I’m truly grateful for the forgotten memories they stirred in my adult brain.

Anyone else willing to share their funny, painful and embarrassing Christmas memories? Come on. You know you want to.


Merry Christmas,
Rachel Gibson




Psssst! Susan here--be sure to check out Rachel's I'm In No Mood For Love. (Book Two in her writers series) Ohhh, yeah!