When I was a little girl, we lived in a log cabin in the woods.
Just kidding. That wasn’t me. That was Laura Ingalls Wilder.
Anyhow, every Christmas we drove up to my grandparent’s house to celebrate with all of our extended family. It was a very traditional event. The Christmas story was read aloud and at random intervals during the reading, someone would sing a Christmas carol. I was always jealous of my sister because she got to sing We Three Kings and I was always stuck singing Away In A Manger, which everyone knows is not nearly as cool. That’s why I taught her an alternate version of the song and convinced her that everyone would LOVE it when she sang it in the middle of the Christmas reading.
My grandfather read about the wise men bearing gifts for the Christ child and then paused for my sister to sing her solo.
And my sister sang “We three kings of Orient are tried to smoke a rubber cigar, it was loaded it exploded, that’s how we traveled so far!”
Then we all got a lesson in not desecrating the story of Christ’s birth. Also, someone threatened to take all of the presents away.
The next part of our Christmas festivities involved everyone standing in a circle and recounting something we were thankful for and then saying a prayer and then singing a song together. This is how Christmas went down in my family, y’all. It’s called “A Very Southern Baptist Christmas.”
The only problem with this scenario is that there were about twenty odd family members gathered together which meant that the whole thing took forever. And I don’t mean as in “you’re seven years old so it FEELS like forever” but legit like, forty-five minutes. And also that my grandmother had passed out candles and each person in the circle was holding one while all of this took place. Lit candles. With flames. That were burning the entire time.
At the end we were supposed to all blow out our candles in unison and there was probably some sort of symbolism in that except that all I could think about was how Aunt Gladys was taking super long to tell us what she was thankful for and who even knows what gallstones are anyway and OH MY GOSH THIS WAX IS INCHING CLOSER AND CLOSER TO MY HAND AND IT IS MOST DEFINITELY GOING TO BURN ME AND THEN I WILL DIE.
That’s when my mother kicked me, I presume to get me to stop fidgeting. Only that backfired because the reason I was fidgeting was to try and contain the wax on the dinky little piece of paper that is supposed to keep it from burning your hand. Only her kicking me totally made me tip the candle and all of the HOT, HOT BURNING CANDLE WAX poured onto my hand.
And because I’m very calm and rational and not at all dramatic, I screamed like a banshee and flung my candle straight towards the large pile of presents placed underneath a very beautiful, very flammable Christmas tree.
Something went up in flames and someone put it out with a fire extinguisher and eventually we continued Christmas around a large, smoldering spot on the carpet and the scent of burnt pine needles which NO ONE believed probably smelled exactly like frankincense and so wasn’t that actually a Christmas miracle?!
And for the rest of my life I would not be able to approach the holidays without hearing “Hey, remember that time YOU SET CHRISTMAS ON FIRE?”
Except that now I am like “Wait, WHICH TIME?”
