By Ellen
Oh, the family's Christmas slide show! What is there these days to equal it?
My Uncle John wasn’t a fan. In fact, every Christmas Eve after dinner at my parents’ house, as soon as my dad began dragging out the boxes of Kodak slide trays, Uncle John announced that it was time to go. “We’ll be heading home now,” he would say as he and my aunt and cousin practically flew out the front door. “I don’t believe we’ll be watching the slides this year.”
That was OK with us, though. We loved our relatives, but we loved our slide show more, and we weren’t about to change the Christmas Eve routine.
First, up went the card table, a mysterious, heavy, four-legged creature that only came out for special occasions. Then came the boxes of slides, followed by the menacing-looking projector that made a lot of metallic-sounding noise and blew hot air and was so temperamental only my father could work it. My brother and I were allowed to help hoist the huge screen up onto its pedestal, then we settled down on the living-room floor to watch pictures of Christmas past.
There was something magical to me about the cozy darkness, the thick carpet on the floor, the spicy smell of the Christmas tree, the sound of the click clack as slides dropped down into the projector and appeared onscreen. My brother and I would pinch and wrestle with each other between slides, though not too much as Santa was watching. My parents would argue gently about whether or not the picture of the 1965 Christmas tree was backwards. My grandparents would cluck and say, “My, my, weren’t you a big girl!” just like they always did. And there I was, up on the screen, captured for all time with the spoils of Christmas. I could figure out how old I was from the gift: the year I was six along came the Chatty Cathy doll, when I was nine I received the Barbie Dream House.
Every year, despite what I considered my growing sophistication, I secretly looked forward to the slide show. After a while, we had so many trays of slides that my dad edited them into one tray entitled “The Best of Christmas” and we watched that instead. And every year I began to notice more about our family as a whole, not just myself, as we appeared in those frozen snippets of time: what we wore, what we ate, our expressions, and the weather outside the windows. And as the years went on, there was photographic proof that times they were a’ changing: we had acne; my grandmother could no longer travel; the gifts changed from dolls and fire engines to socks and bathrobes; my brother and I posed without sitting close to each other, just to show how cool we were.
Soon my children and I will probably pull out our shoeboxes full of photos and trace our own histories at Christmas. And I’ll enjoy it, of course. But somehow I don’t think it will be the same to flip through the prints as it was to lie on the floor and watch the slides of yesteryear. There was something special about being cocooned in my warm living room and at ease with family tradition –- even my uncle’s annual departure –- that can never be recaptured. I’ll never again be as full of wonder as I was back then, looking way, way up at that little girl so full of Christmas innocence and glee on the screen.
Ellen is a 50-year-old mother of two, stepmother of two, who lives in North Carolina with her family.
Great post!
I can't help but think that the modern twist to the Christmas slideshow is the Christmas Power Point presentation - lol.
I would love to do something like this myself! :) :)
Posted by: andrea | December 21, 2005 at 08:12 AM