Christmas 1961

Here is an excerpt from “Christmas to Me,” a 1961 Harper Lee essay that appeared in McCall’s magazine, as quoted in The Mockingbird Next Door:

“What I really missed was a memory, an old memory of people long since gone, of my grandparents’ house bursting with cousins, smilax*, and holly. I missed the sound of hunting boots, the sudden open-door gusts of chilly air that cut through the aroma of pine needles and oyster dressing. I missed my brother’s night-before-Christmas mask of rectitude and my father’s bumblebee bass humming “Joy to the World.”

What sounds and scents and sensations fill your memories of Christmases past?

*Smilax rotundifolia, known as common greenbrier, is a woody vine native to the eastern and south-central United States and to eastern Canada. Used like holly as a holiday decoration.