Christmas Day & Mother's Day
Christmas Day and Mother's Day go hand-in-hand for me ... or maybe more like hand-in-stocking. Since my childhood, Christmas has always begun the same way: We tear into stockings Mom knitted just for us, each one made in time for our own first Christmas. My brother and sisters have stockings just like mine. So do our spouses, kids and grandkids , plus a few ex- and almost-spouses and various others. Mom copied the pattern from the stocking of a family friend, counting stitch-by-stitch and recording it on graph paper to make her first stocking in 1955 , for my sister Becky. She used that same pattern to make her 30th stocking in 2010, for my granddaughter Ava — Mom's second great-grandchild. My favorite Christmas memory is of waking before dawn with my siblings and plundering our stockings, knowing they held enough treasure to tide us over until breaking light made it safe to nag our parents out of bed to open presents. We rummaged through a king's ra...