Topic -Christmas

Topic Christmas 
I still have my Christmas cup. In fact, I drank eggnog from it this Christmas morning. My mom gave it to me in 1972 when I was in grade school.  Mom didn’t let me use it for eggnog drinking until Christmas morning. Now I get all my Christmas mugs out the day after Thanksgiving and set them on one of her woven placemats next to my coffee maker. I use all the other coffee mugs throughout the month of December, but not the Christmas cup. When I got old enough to consider that I might actually want to give some gifts as opposed to just receiving them, Mom presented me with my Christmas cup. Every year starting the day after Thanksgiving she would offer cash for chores around the house. They weren’t glamorous-scrub the kitchen floor for $.50 or deep clean the bathroom for $.75, basically the things she didn’t want to do.  She’d deposit my earnings in the Christmas cup until I’d amassed enough cash to buy gifts for my parents and my two little brothers. Mom would take me shopping at Northgate Mall, just me and her. After we got gifts for everyone, usually a candle or some lotion for her, cheap toys for my brothers and Brut aftershave for dad, we would go to Pogue’s Ice Cream Balcony for lunch.  The restaurant was just like it sounds. They served ice cream sodas and sundaes and sandwiches, and the restaurant itself had tables that overlooked the mall below. Back then the mall was relatively new and featured a few indoor fountains. It seemed pretty fancy to my seven-year-old self. I remember thinking that the trip was worth all the floors and toilets I had scrubbed.  But I still had to wait till Christmas morning before I was allowed to drink out of that Christmas cup. And now I’m 53 years old and married with grown kids. I have lost both my parents to cancer in the past two years. Last night when I was making Christmas Eve dinner for our family, a task I that felt rightfully mine to do after mom died, I almost made myself a little jack and Diet Coke in my Christmas cup. It was just sitting there on the counter with the other Christmas mugs. I had been cooking and cleaning since early that morning and I think I heard my mom say it was “scotch time”. Who was going to stop me? But I’m the end I couldn’t do it.  I made my drink in the one of the plastic cups I’d set by the ice bucket. And I waited till this morning to drink from my Christmas cup. I waited because I find comfort in tradition but mostly because that cup taught me about delaying gratification and about hard work and the joy of giving.  
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