The Holidays My Kids Actually Remember
The perfect holidays all blur together. The disasters, food-stamp feasts, lost children, and dumpster-diving missions? Those apparently became family holiday lore.
When my kids talk about holidays from when they were little, they almost never talk about the ones that went according to plan. They don't remember the Christmases when I bought the right gifts, decorated the house, wrapped everything nicely, cooked the meal, and pulled off whatever version of a “normal” holiday I was trying to create that year. Those all seem to have merged into one giant childhood Christmas in everybody's memory.
What they remember are the holidays when everything went completely off the rails.
Take Easter.
At one point, I had six or seven kids with me at a community Easter egg hunt. The hunt was divided into age groups, and naturally my children were scattered across three different divisions. I made what seemed like a reasonable parenting decision at the time: a six-year-old and an eight-year-old could surely manage to run around inside their designated section picking up plastic eggs without direct supervision for a few minutes.
Apparently I had forgotten who Drew was.
At some point, Drew stopped recognizing the concept of “designated section” and simply began hunting Easter eggs everywhere.
I think we finally figured out where he was because we heard his name announced over the loudspeaker.
Drew had won a prize for collecting the most eggs.
Of course he had.
Apparently nobody noticed—or cared—that his winning strategy involved disregarding the age divisions entirely and harvesting eggs across the whole damn event.
We did not stick around long enough for anyone to conduct an official egg-counting investigation.
That probably says something about the number of times one of my children wandered off during those years. There comes a point in parenting a large family when events that should probably qualify as emergencies become stories you tell later while everybody laughs and says, “Oh yeah, I forgot about that.”
We lost Drew again at Halloween. This time it was a corn maze.
That sounds peaceful when you say it. A corn maze. Cute little fall family activity. Maybe some pumpkins. Hot cider. Wholesome memories.
No.
Drew shot off like a rocket almost immediately after the first turn. Gone.
The maze was huge, and there was a wooden bridge somewhere near the middle that served as a lookout point. The employees had walkie-talkies and started communicating with each other, trying to locate my missing child.
The problem was that Drew did not understand they were trying to help him. Every time one of the workers spotted him and tried to approach, he thought they were chasing him.
So he ran.
For approximately forty-five minutes.
The employees would radio each other. Somebody would catch sight of him. They'd move toward him. Drew would see them coming and take off deeper into the corn like a tiny fugitive. Eventually, they managed to catch him.
When I asked him why in the world he kept running away from the people who were clearly trying to find him, he looked at me like the answer was obvious.
He thought they were after him.
Fair enough, I suppose.
Then there was the Christmas when I took two of the kids, who were about five and seven, for what was supposed to be a quick walk through an enormous neighborhood.
“Santa” had just passed out gifts, there was a lot of commotion going on at the family gathering, and these two were overstimulated and getting grumpy. I figured a little walk in the fresh air would settle them down.
This was not supposed to be an expedition, so naturally I left my cell phone at the house and had not told anyone we had left.
We somehow could not find our way back.
The neighborhood became our own version of the Hundred Acre Wood. It was dark, and it was cold—Florida cold, which means probably the high 60s, but still. We kept passing light posts with piles of leaves and yard debris beside them, and after a while I started wondering whether we were passing different light posts or the same damn one over and over again.
We were.
Of course, I couldn't let a five- and seven-year-old know that their mother had absolutely no idea how to get them home. They were already tired and overstimulated, and crying wasn't going to improve our situation, so I turned being lost into an adventure.
“How many light posts can we find with piles of leaves next to them?”
Suddenly we weren't hopelessly wandering around a gigantic neighborhood in the dark. They were kept busy by counting the same light post over again and again and again while I started methodically tracking our path and creating a mental neighborhood map, which was more like a small town.
What was supposed to be a quick walk turned into about two hours. Eventually, we made it all the way out the back side of the neighborhood and found a gas station. From there, we made a call, and my brother and mother had already been sent out as the extraction team and came upon us shortly after the call.
So the Christmas memory wasn't just Santa and presents.
It was also the night Mom took two small children on a “quick walk,” disappeared for two hours without a cell phone, and turned getting hopelessly lost into a light-post-counting adventure so nobody would cry.
Those weren't even the only unconventional holidays.
There was one Halloween when I looked at the cost of costumes and decided I wasn't doing it. Instead of spending money we didn't really have on outfits the kids would wear for a few hours, we used food stamps to buy candy, junk food, and every terrible thing we normally wouldn't have loaded into the cart.
Then we stayed home and had a horror-movie night. No costumes. No trick-or-treating. No carefully curated Halloween experience. Just a pile of kids, scary movies, and an irresponsible quantity of junk food.
They remember that one.
Then there was the "Food-stamp Christmas".
Money was very tight, but I had food stamps, so I decided food was going to become part of the presents. Each child got a certain amount and was allowed to choose whatever they wanted.
Whatever.
Not what made nutritional sense. Not what we normally bought. Not what was practical. It was Christmas.
I also turned the dining room table into a feast. Crab legs. Shrimp. Steak. Things we absolutely were not eating on a normal week. We ate like royalty, and then I spent the rest of the month getting very creative with what was left.
But for that one day, the table was full.
And then there was dumpster diving.
This may have been one of our finest family operations.
I had a four-door truck, and everybody had a job. One child was the scout. That assignment went to whoever was agile enough to jump out, run ahead, inspect the dumpster quickly, and determine whether it had possibilities. Another child handled the lid and climbed in if something was buried too far down to reach. Then there was a retrieval person and somebody stationed at the truck to grab the loot and get it loaded.
We even had hand signals.
The big sweeping come on wave meant move in. A closed fist meant STOP—I hear something. And then there was the rapid forward karate-chop motion:
GO! GO! GO!
At that signal, everybody piled back into the truck and we moved on to the next target.
We operated like some kind of deeply underfunded SEAL Team Six.
The mission was the back side of an entire strip mall on Christmas Eve. There were no posted signs that I remember, no cameras staring us down, and almost nobody around. The actual risk of getting caught was extremely low.
That was not how the children experienced it.
As far as they were concerned, we were conducting a hazardous nighttime raid. Every stop had tension. Every dumpster had potential. Every closed fist meant danger. Every frantic karate chop meant extraction.
We ended up with craft supplies, a package of brand-new socks, and a handful of other random things I don't even remember anymore.
The stuff wasn't the point.
The kids were exhilarated.
And that is the strange thing I notice now when we talk about their childhood. They don't remember the gifts. Not really.
They don't remember which Christmas had which toys, which decorations I used, which meal I cooked, or whether I managed to create the kind of holiday I thought a good mother was supposed to create. Those Christmases blend together.
But they remember being lost in a corn maze. They remember the Easter egg hunt where Drew apparently decided the age divisions were merely suggestions—and somehow won by treating them exactly that way. They remember wandering around a neighborhood in the dark counting light posts because their mother couldn't find the way home.
They remember junk-food Halloween. They remember choosing whatever they wanted with food stamps. They remember crab legs on the dining room table.
And they definitely remember riding around in a truck on Christmas Eve, using tactical hand signals and jumping in and out behind a strip mall like we were committing crimes of national importance for a bag of craft supplies and some socks.
For years, I thought creating good memories meant keeping the holiday traditions from my childhood, but instead I created new holiday family lore.
The holidays my kids remember most are the ones when tradition got tossed aside, the plan failed, money was tight, somebody got lost, or we made something ridiculous out of whatever we had.
Maybe childhood memories don't care very much about whether the day looked right.
Maybe they just care that something happened worth telling again.