Scribes with Scrolls Christmas Special | Page 21

Last year was the first Christmas we celebrated after losing my precious grandmother. I invited my family to spend the holidays at our home in Texas, hoping that the void would be less painful in a different setting. So they came and we walked the delicate line of old and new, tradition and invention. We have many Christmas traditions. I always say that when someone marries into our family, they need a script to follow on Christmas morning…. The correct order to sit on the stairs, the whacky song we sing to the tune of the halleluiah chorus when the old doll that has landed in someone’s stocking since 1977 is pulled out, the beignets that my very French great-grandmother fried up for us, and then my Nannie, and now my mom and I. There is a rhythm and ritual to that morning that is all our own, and it is beautiful. And when someone is gone, it is painful. But our favorite tradition by far is called Poem Time, and there was no way I was going to let it die.

My spirited Nannie started Poem Time when my brothers and I were little. After all of the gifts under the tree had been opened, and we sat in the mass of toys and wrapping paper, she would quietly slip out and then return holding a yard stick with a poster board sign stapled on that simply read, “Poem Time.” The much coveted Poem Time gift was the “big one.” Nannie would read a series of the cutest, silliest poems that would first reveal the recipient, and then take that lucky one on a scavenger hunt to find clues, parts of the gift, or more poems. It was a blast! In the end it was the adventure in the hunt, and all the time and love that had gone into writing all of those poems that was the real gift.