Christmas in our clan had always been a big deal.

Our immediate family was small, but somewhere along the line, long before my birth, my Grandmother Esther (or "Mommy Esther" as I called her) became the Matriarch with the heart of gold. That didn't always extend itself in favorable directions. Christmas Eve was chosen to be the official time of celebration amongst us.

This was because originally there was the family and then there were all the strays; the many friends and people who had nowhere to go...and it became too much work to do this two days in a row. So as long as I can recall , Christmas Eve was officially Christmas.

Our family was rather splintered and by this time, this particular year, all the Great Grand Parents had passed on. So it was us; the disjointed immediate family and all of those who had been trailing along for years as well as others. I was eleven years old and this was the year I decided to move out of my Mother's house and in with my Grandparents; her Mother, and Father.

This was not an easy choice for me to make, but for many reasons I had resolved it was the best thing to do.

My Grandparents had just moved into the house that for as long as I can remember was referred to as "the shack". It was a house my great Grandpa Louie had started to build on the back of the property in hid old age (in his 70's) and after he had a stroke he could never finish it.

I can still recall the smell of  sawdust from my very early childhood.

It was kind of like the haunted house that no one wanted to go near. It sat right along side of the creek, and was secluded by large cedars, older than my long since deceased great Grandfather who built the place.

This was the house where I always imagined Grandpa Louie chopped off his thumb. The thumb I used to marvel at as a little girl for it's smoothness and, well, just plain weirdness. I used to imagine it laying somewhere , in those ancient pile' of sawdust.

Anyway, I moved in with my Grandparents in early December. I was in the sixth grade and it was right before my twelfth birthday. My Grandmother , in my early childhood, was my savior. My Mother was not so loving and preferred the company of her newest husband but I could always find refuge in Mommy Esther.

So the shack was pretty bare. It WAS, quite literally, a shack. A very well built one, but still it was bare wood walls, no electricity, no bathroom, and the only running water was a faucet that came up through the floor of what would become the kitchen.

It was a huge responsibility to have the big Christmas party. In our family we always referred to it as the "Christmas Miracle" My Grandmother was self employed as a dressmaker. My Grandfather was sick in bed. The house, wherever we lived, was always a complete disaster...and so to get the house clean and decorated in time for Christmas Eve - truly was a miracle.

So here we were - in a barren shack - having to create the impossible. Our only furnishings, at this time, were a kitchen table, which doubled as my Grandmother's sewing table (It was comprised of two saw horses with a big sheet of plywood on top), and some random chairs from the yard and who knows where. The table cloth was a piece of red paisley fabric from a bar mitzvah my Grandmother had sewn  for. We always called this "The Jewish material". There was lots of it. All of us had something made out of it or at least have patched our jeans with it.

We got some industrial sized extension cords and ran them from the house next door for a bit of electricity. Our heat was furnished by the stone fireplace in the kitchen - "Swiss style" supposedly. My Grandmother's cousin  Casey had a wallpaper store nearby and she acquired all the outdated sample books from him.

So, our project, together, was to make the shack seem bright and cheerful. My Uncle and whoever else slapped up some drywall in the kitchen area. Mommy Esther and I spent about two days wall papering the entire kitchen in a crazy quilt of wallpaper samples - all different colors, patterns ,designs....and wherever there was a gap, we filled it in with the color pages from the Women's Wear dailies her sewing customers had given her.

I do not know how many pots of tea we had in two days, but the kitchen looked absolutely stunning! This was one of the funnest things to do with a grown up that I can still think of. All of the guests were told to dress for Winter; coats, hats, etc... and they would be required to decorate the tree.

And so they arrived.

But so did the snow! This was one of the only Christmases of my life when it actually snowed on Christmas! We managed to get the toilet installed in time too!

My Grandmother cooked various aspects of the Christmas dinner at various neighbor's houses and we ran the stove from an extension cord so we could make coffee and keep things warm.

I remember an ironic moment of my Grandmother pulling the Angel Biscuits out of the oven and saying, "Oh damn. The Angel Biscuits have fallen!" Something like this could only come out of her mouth. It was hilarious!

I loved everyone standing around in coats, scarves, and mittens, eating Christmas dinner standing up.

I don't even remember presents that year...but what does it matter?

It was one of the most amazing Christmas miracles I think I will ever know.