Nina Gilfert | From the Porch Steps: This time of year
This is the time of year when everything changes. Some changes are good and others are scary.
Folks schedule vacations so they can enjoy the holidays with family and some families are overwhelmed with visitors. My situation has changed many times the past six months because of health issues. When you are very old that happens.
I lived for a while with my youngest son and lately I moved in to temporary quarters with my youngest daughter and her family, thus complicating their lives and changing sleeping arrangements for Thanksgiving. My next stop and probably final one is my oldest son's home in Tennessee.
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It is cold where Tom lives this time of year but I grew up in the same kind of climate in Pennsylvania in the 1930s so I know what to expect. I have a quilted jacket and a warm wool cap and will have to get some boots and gloves and warm sweaters.
I sold my home about a year ago after suffering a heart problem so I am now a wonderer, wondering about my next stop.
This is an up-close and positive way to get to know your children all over again. It also gives you a chance to see how much of your influence really reached them and affected their lifestyle.
I have lived with three of them now and my oldest son has accepted me as a lifetime resident. This isn't easy for someone as independent as I have been.
In the interest of cooperation it is necessary for me to change my habits to fit in with their ways. This has made keeping up with my writing responsibilities difficult.
I have been writing a three-chapter story for this column which will begin next week. It is a children's story to be read aloud by their parents and grandparents over the Christmas holiday. I do this every year and hope you will enjoy it.
This year's story is about a children's club that planned a surprise for their neighbors.
When I was growing up in a small town in Pennsylvania the Christmas season was pretty predictable. We planned a program at school to give to the parents just before our Christmas holiday from school began.
In those days schools were permitted to celebrate religious holidays the same as the rest of the community, so we presented programs that were Bible-based with angels and a bright star and the baby in the manger. None of the few Jewish families in our small town objected.
Because of my blond hair I was usually cast as an angel. It was certainly not based on angelic behavior.
I was dressed all in white with paper wings and stood up on a stool above the class and visitors. One year there was a colored candle placed next to me and the fumes made me feel faint, which I almost did, causing a near riot.
When I left home at 17 to work in Washington, D.C. for the war effort, I learned to spend Christmas a different way. My cousin Janet and I lived in a second-floor bedroom and bath in a row house on a residential street in Southeast Washington.
The second year we were there we decided we were mature enough to spend Christmas away from home. On Christmas Eve, one of the other residents left a bottle of wine on our doorstep, so we decided to get some other residents together and drink it.
We sat on the floor in the dark except for the lights on the small Christmas tree we had set up in our room. We opened the wine and took our first experimental taste. And then another and then another.
Janet said, “You had better not drink anymore or you will feel bad in the morning.” I shrugged and had another sip.
I woke up the next morning with a very upsetting hangover. Unfortunately, all the girls had dates with some sailors who were stuck in Washington over Christmas to go to breakfast and I was too sick to go. That was my very first and worst Christmas away from home, so I never did such a foolish thing again.
They all went out and had a great time while I stayed home in bed. Someone said a wine hangover is the worst hangover. I was careful to make that my first and last.
Several years later my last job in Washington was as a supervisor in the Commerce Department in charge of a group of nine Varitypists. I left to get married and move to California where my new husband was to go to Aeronautical Engineering School at Northrop.
His schooling was interrupted by his being called back into the Marine Corps for the Korean War and I was left with two babies living in a community housing project with a number of other engineering school families. It was definitely a learning experience.
You expect your life to follow a normal path and suddenly it doesn't. Divorce reared its ugly head and sent me reeling, but life is what you make it, come what may.
Christmas season is a time for reminiscing and a time for rejoicing in family and friends. Sometimes you have to forget the less pleasant things in life and simply be glad to be alive and eating regularly.
So put aside your worries over Covid contagion and lack of funds and enjoy. May God bless you and yours in this difficult time.
Nina Gilfert can be reached at ngporch@gmail.com
This article originally appeared on Daily Commercial: This time of year is when things seem to change, for better or worse
