Our Ghosts of Christmas Past can visit us in dreams
Our Christmas tree always looked like Dale Earnhardt and Liberace collided with a truck hauling gold spray-painted macaroni.
My handmade, uncooked macaroni masterpieces dangled on red yarn alongside my sister’s lovingly sculpted paper plate snowmen. Construction paper turkeys the size and shape of our little hands grew brittle and faded, but Mom placed each one carefully on a limb, facing outward like sentinels watching over our family during another holiday season.1
Our tree was always smothered in fake spray snow. My mother loved that stuff. By mid-December, fake snow dust was on every piece of furniture in the house. Our guests would leave with wide, white streaks — like a skunk’s back — on their clothes from sitting on the living room sofa.
Metallic strands of silver were draped in clumps between the ornaments. They were supposed to look like icicles, but all they ever did was reach out and shock anyone wearing slippers on the shag carpet who dared walk by.
Our holiday meals were assembled from years of McCall’s and Woman’s Day magazine recipes. There was always turkey and the usual side dishes — corn pudding, sweet potatoes, green beans with Funyuns, Cool Whip Surprise, something we called “Funeral Potatoes” and Mom’s “Death by Mayonnaise” casserole — but every year would usually contain a few surprises.
“I saw this in Woman’s Day,” an industrious aunt might say, “and I thought we could try it out.” She would then uncover the dish to reveal the latest trend in 1970s cuisine involving dried Chinese noodles, Ritz crackers and sweetened condensed milk.
Due to my family’s eccentricities in the kitchen, I now have strange culinary predilections that most people don’t share, nor should they. My mother was considered the best cook in our family, despite her tendency to burn just about everything. We always joked that the smoke alarm was Mom’s cooking timer.2
Since I grew up eating burnt food, I actually like things “overcooked.” My daughters will make chocolate chip cookies when I visit, and they always know to burn a few for their old man. I like that. It’s comforting. Reminds me of my childhood.
One of my favorite holiday treats is potato candy.3 But I like it stale. In my family, it was made at Thanksgiving and left to sit out with the sugar cookies and fudge on a plate in the dining room of Grandma’s house for weeks before we all showed up again for dinner on Christmas Day.
A bowl of hard candy was always next to a bowl of walnuts on the coffee table in our living room. I never once saw anyone crack and eat the walnuts. The candy was striped red, white and purple and stuck together for years. I think Mom pulled the bowl out of storage every year and set it back out to gather lint, furnace dust and cat hair. The one piece I popped in my mouth tasted like a cherry cough drop soaked in Estée Lauder and Glade.
My mother loved Christmas. She hosted Christmas Eve dinners every year, inviting folks who were going through a rough time: recent divorcees, single moms and their children, elderly shut-ins. My stepfather, Rusty, would drive to their homes to pick them up while Mom put the finishing touches on holiday favorites in her tiny kitchen. Christmas Eve transformed our little two-bedroom, one-bath house into a place of refuge from the storms of life. Our living room was filled with a lovable band of misfits my mother had curated personally from church and neighborhood homes. Our guests laughed and chatted comfortably, drinking punch4 from a large, ornate glass bowl with matching cups that only came out for very special occasions. And despite her meager income, Mom made sure every guest had a gift.5
My stepfather was just here, in a dream I had. I’m writing this in my journal now so I don’t forget.
I can still feel his strength, his casual but unwavering confidence. His scent is still here, too, in the room with me. And that’s what shakes me the most, makes me ask the question, “Was he actually here?” Because I can still smell him: a mix of Aqua Velva, Corn Huskers Lotion and hours of body sweat soaked and dried into his flannel work shirt.6
I guess writing this column has stirred something up, and I’ve been dreaming about my family a lot this week. Mom has been here. A favorite aunt and uncle just dropped by last night to say hello in my sleep.
In my dream of Rusty, he asked me what I was writing, and I replied without looking up, “Just working on my column for The Tennessee Magazine.”
“Nice,” he replied, and he disappeared before I realized I had just been visited by a loved one I hadn’t seen since he died in 2008. But it felt so natural to be inside the dream, I didn’t think anything of it.
And that’s how dreams work, I guess. Most of the people I’ve written about here have passed on. I think of them often and smile. They taught me, they guided me and they were sometimes disappointed in me. But they were always rooting for me.
Mom was considered the best cook in the family, despite her tendency to overcook — even burn — just about everything. We always joked that the smoke alarm was her cooking timer.
Some of you reading this might be missing someone, and that makes the holidays hard. I know. I didn’t decorate — I couldn’t even set up my tree — for two years after my wife, Deana Lynn, passed away.
But I have a new tree this year, and I’ll soon be opening the boxes with my own children’s hand-sized turkeys and paper plate snowmen from so many years ago. Only the construction paper is faded. The memories are as vivid as when they were made.
And it’s nice to know that I can still visit with loved ones — if not in life, then in dreams at least.
Have a wonderful holiday season, dear readers. Cheers!
Antsy McClain is a Nashville-adjacent singer-songwriter, author, graphic artist and lover of potato candy. Go to unhitched.com for his family recipe for potato candy and more. Use this QR code to download and listen to “Mary Lou’s Christmas List,” FREE to readers of The Tennessee Magazine.
Footnotes to give you confidence, better health and a brighter smile!
1 Commemorative Winston cigarette ornaments, gifted by my uncle, danced randomly on our tree. He would save proof-of-purchase labels from the cartons he went through on his two-packs-a-day habit, and the premiums were his annual contribution to the family gift exchange.
We had a Winston tote bag in the pantry for years that held plastic Kroger and Kmart bags. Mom played solitaire for years using a deck of cards that boasted “Winston Tastes Good Like a Cigarette Should” printed on the box in gold letters.
A Tiffany-inspired Winston lampshade hung above my uncle’s pool table, which cost at least a hundred proof of purchase labels and definitely revealed where we fell in his priorities.
2 I’m of the suspicion that Mom routinely burnt food because even more than her love for cooking, my mother loved to talk. And I believe her chattiness would cause her to forget that she had placed something in the oven or on the stove.
She once welcomed a hapless pair of Jehovah’s Witnesses into our home, sat them down on the sofa and talked at them for more than three hours without taking a breath. I would meander through the living room just to see the looks of despair on their faces, as if silently admonishing themselves — and God — for their misfortune of arriving at our house.
We never saw another set of Jehovah’s Witnesses ever again. An encyclopedia salesman once left our home in tears and promptly joined the Air Force.
3 Potato candy is rumored to be an old Irish American recipe made by boiling a small potato and mixing it into a dough using powdered sugar, lots and lots of powdered sugar. A generous layer of peanut butter is spread onto the flattened dough and rolled up and sliced into pinwheels. In my opinion, it is best when it has sat out for at least a week until the dough gets crispy and the peanut butter has what could be called a “room” taste.
4 My mother and stepfather had both sworn off liquor when they started going to church. From that point forward, the only punch my mother ever served was 7UP and rainbow sherbet. As the sherbet would melt, the 7UP got cloudy until it looked like milk from a goat that also happened to be a Shriners clown.
A sweeter, more sugary concoction has never been known to man. After one cup, my teeth were coated with a film so persistent, it challenged even the sturdiest toothbrush.
One morning in early January, after weeks of family recipe consumption, I went to my dentist. He took one look at my teeth and told his secretary to cancel that day’s appointments.
5 Mom started Christmas shopping in April, putting ceramic knickknacks and cotton blouses on layaway at Kmart until she had the funds she needed from selling Avon. In the weeks leading up to Christmas, she would go through her list of family, friends and dinner guests and thoughtfully wrap each present. There were always a few extra in case someone was invited at the last minute or showed up unexpectedly. It was not in my mother’s nature to leave anyone out.
6 Rusty was a blue collar guy. He told me, “There are two kinds of men in this world: the kind who shower before work and the kind who shower after work. You’re gonna be the kind who showers before work.” In other words, he wanted me to go to college and be a white collar guy. While I’ve never considered myself white collar, and I’ve never had a job where someone called me “boss,” he and Mom made sure I got to college. When I graduated high school, they gave me a big leather suitcase and a crisp $100 bill. I took the hint and hit the road, looking back only figuratively — in my writing — over the years. Writers have a tendency toward restlessness only to romanticize the worlds they couldn’t wait to escape.
