Trust the timing. Click here to read the article. I think my earliest Christmas memory was of a cardboard Christmas tree, more like a Christmas cone with blue sparkles on it and holes punched in it.
When you plugged in the light underneath, the heat made it spin around. People are lighting up cardboard cones and dragging big trees into the house.
And over the years I found all sorts of things under those trees, a tricycle, a doll, a lot of socks. But my favorite gift came when I was about sixteen. The card always said with love from Mommy and Daddy but my father was usually just as surprised as I was on Christmas morning to see what he had given me.
It got to be sort of a joke after awhile. In fact, I actually discovered some little pieces of cheese that tasted really, really good and I asked the hostess what it was. And she said it was an imported cheese from Holland called Edam.
Well, I really liked that cheese. And I figured with some typical teen-age resentment that this was just another example that I was doomed to a life of predictability and processed foods and parents who, of course, could never possibly understand my teenage angst or the great, imported thoughts I was thinking on a daily basis. And then I saw one more box under the tree. Merry Christmas. Love, Daddy. I opened it up. It was a little wheel of Edam cheese.
