Storyboom 12-4-2022 HOLIDAYS!

Last night’s show was another great Storyboom show, and I got to tell a mini-story as the host. Here it is:

Oh, the holidays. I’ll never forget my First Christmas. I was 32 years old. I married into a Hallmark Holiday Style Midwestern Christian Family. My husband, was, still is, the family rebel. Came to New York, married a Jew, even converted. But I had always dreamed about the glow and sparkle of a Christmas holiday. So, against my husband’s recommendation, I decided to go big. I combed through ladies’ magazines and found instructions in Woman’s Day for these adorable, homemade Christmas cookie ornament, where you melt hard candy to make panes of stained glass, and you embed family portrait photos in each.

I broke into my new husband’s stash of childhood photographs and found a picture of each of the 23 people who would be present. I turned our hip, NY apartment into Santa’s workshop, and I made Christmas cookie ornaments. They were, ahem, bigger than intended and slightly misshapen, but not a bad first attempt. A pain in the ass to pack up in my suitcase for the trip to Chicago. My sister-in-law’s house was the picture-perfect Christmas scene I had always imagined. As I proudly hung each ornament on the tree, next to similar ornaments that the 5-year-old kids had made, my ornaments sort of slumped on the branches. It was humiliating. Dopey. So humiliating that I am not yet ready to laugh about it 34 years later. Everyone graciously said nothing about my ridiculous gesture. I have no idea what they thought or said after we left. I am eternally grateful that social media did not exist back then.