Simple Pleasures
By: susan peterson stamis
Tags: baby dolls, carols, Christmas, Christmas Eve, faraway, greek, mailboxes, Sears and Roebuck, simple pleasures, toys, travel, underpants
Category: Uncategorized
Like a runaway freight train, Christmas Day hurtles headlong towards us. On one of my several trips to the fancy festive mall in town, I merged onto the freeway, slipping Pearl (my white Volvo SUV) between two trucks of a long Fedex convoy.
In the spirit of the season, I sported a thick red scarf and Pearl had a bright red bow attached to her front grill. For as far as we could see on the road ahead of us, the big white vans lumbered up the northbound lanes en route to their deliveries of precious holiday stuff.
Christmas music blasted from my old iPod, the songs transmitted through Pearl’s pretty decent stereo. I sang along, doing my very best Elvis, Brenda Lee and Chipmunks impressions; wondered for the thousandth time what the heck Bing Crosby and David Bowie were thinking; and reminisced about the not so successful figgy pudding I once baked and served to Christmas carolers who politely refrained from spitting it out on my doorstep.
As I headed to my destination, blithely belting out the wrong lyrics to just about every song, I pondered. “What goodies are the recipients of those Fedex deliveries waiting for?” “Are their pleasures simple or grand?” “On Christmas morning, will the children and their parents be pleased?”
Each Christmas season of my remembered childhood, the new three-inch thick Sears and Roebuck catalog made its appearance in our faraway mailboxes. For days on end I lay on the living room floor, hugging the huge catalog to my skinny hopeful chest, dog earring practically every single brightly colored page of its vast toy section, and reluctantly relinquishing the giant magical book only when it had to do double duty as a booster seat.
But, on Christmas Day there were no mountain high stacks of playthings under the tree, because my practical mother was selective in her economical purchases; and while we always got a toy or two, more often than not our cheerfully wrapped packages contained mundane clothing.
Every Christmas Eve, my sleepy sister and I were tumbled from our beds and clad in party dresses to honor the Greek tradition of opening presents at midnight. In our dopey state, we smiled for Dad’s camera, unwrapped our gifts and promptly returned to our rumpled beds hugging new baby dolls or, as in the case of my eager three-year-old little self on this long ago Christmas, wearing new underpants.
Simple pleasures.
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About Me
My father was a Consular Officer in the United States Foreign Service. He was first stationed in post World War II Berlin, where I was born in 1950. Subsequently, we lived in the Philippines; Jamaica; Guatemala; Washington, DC; Greece; Ceylon and Mexico; visiting many places in between. I was reared by my parents and nurtured by the various amahs, nannies, and housemaids who, every two years or so, entered and exited my little life.
I was educated in American Schools in “foreign lands,” but the most fascinating classrooms were the exotic locales where we lived, and the most inspiring teachers were the colorful people of those exotic and ancient cultures.
The bi-annual “home leaves” which my family spent at my grandparents’ homes in Los Angeles, California provided a sense of constancy to our nomadic lifestyle. My many aunts, uncles and cousins lived there and I eagerly looked forward to those vacations. We were 1st and 2nd generation Greek Americans (all 4 of my grandparents had immigrated at the turn of the century), and thus had foreignness stamped onto us even though we were Americans.
Two of my father’s siblings were also in the diplomatic service, and we world-traveling cousins were a source of endless curiosity to our domestic counterparts when we came home speaking English with unusual accents, reducing the statesiders to hysterics.With his various cameras, Kodachrome, Ektachrome, 16 millimeter, Super 8 and Polaroid, my father rarely lost an opportunity to document the events unfolding around us. After years of waiting patiently in boxes under the stairs, these photographic records are now fulfilling their purpose as mnemonic retrievals of my little life.
Mnemonic Retrievals 
I wish there was a LOVE button.
Merry Christmas, Susie! I hope you get new underwear this Christmas, too! xxoo