Holiday Reminiscences

Have you ever found that a missing front tooth makes a kid look cuter? I was just at the store and a kid like that smiled aimlessly around, revealing the little gap in his mouth. Kids are always cute, no matter how awkwardly they walk, how impertinent they speak. An adult can never get away with it, but kids can.

Anyway, this time of the year always brings back memories. I don’t know why, as if I haven’t had too much reminiscence already. My mind has a mind of its own. It dwells on things that I don’t want it to dwell on. Actually the more I don’t want to dwell on something, the more it wants to think about it.

When I was young, living on the border of Mongolian steppe, I looked forward to the big holiday all year round. Children were allowed to stuff themselves sick with candies, nuts, honeyed dates, hawthorn cakes, deep fried dough in various shapes. And I often did stuff myself sick–that was the first sign of my binge eating, which is typical in a child of narcissistic parents.

The most coveted holiday food items were dates picked in alcohol. Kids loved them so much. However since it was relatively expensive, we could only have one or two each time. One year, I got my hands on a handful of alcoholed dates, big pieces of cakes with creams on top, deep fried twisted dough. I stuffed myself to the brim and ended up getting sick for a week.

And there were also other holiday things that we didn’t usually see during the rest of the year:

Holiday Decorations

In our area, dyed papers were used to make paper art, poems were written on red papers to be plastered on door frames, red envelops stuffed with cash were passed around as gifts.

The Neighborhood

Several neighboring families would come together to have one big noisy dinner together, which usually lasted from afternoon to midnight. These are usually the same families which did their “vegetable pickling” together back in October. I loved these big gatherings since people were always in high spirit and children were allowed limitless food, and occasional sips of the alcohol the adults were drinking.

The Holiday Visits

In the U.S., people drive or fly home for holidays. However back in the steppe when I was young, one had to visit everybody one knew in the neighborhood and every visit had to be returned. In the rural college where my mother worked and we lived, we spent three days to visit everybody around us. Neither my father nor my mother had families living nearby, so we didn’t have to add relatives on our visiting list. At every home we visited, I would be fed nuts and candies. People were so happy and even my narcissistic parents were happy–my mother reduced her complaints about housework and my father made an effort to be sociable.