Giving of arts and crafts has been interwoven tradition in my family for years. In lean years, we made gifts for people. I still have several of the treasures that my talented mother made. I have some also that I made for family members not with us any longer. I have been making Christmas stockings for people in my family since my first born. My great grandmother made my first Christmas stocking that I still have and display each year. My grandmother made a giant Christmas stocking that has inspired me always in my work on Christmas stockings.
I love all of the handmade crafts made by my family – these are true treasures. Even more, I love the memory of being taught how to do something by family and friends. My mom taught me how to do needlework (crewel embroidery), that I learned in Girl Scouts, but didn’t refine until my mom showed me some key points of understanding about the skill – today we’d call them “hacks”. Back in the day, we did not have social media and widespread how-to’s available to us except in books and magazines or if we were lucky, with a mom or grandmother who could show us what to do real-time.
Very much I wanted to carry on the spirit of tradition and love of making by hand the Christmas stockings. In this, I made a Christmas stocking for my grandchild just in time for his first Christmas in 2015. It was a work of love and hard work this is. Needle work is always hard and it takes love to drive it and have it look right – creativity is a must. Here is a little video of my tour of the stocking (pardon my amateurish camera work!). Hoping that this lasts so that my grandson can see this one day, and appreciate it.
Everyone loves to look at the work and ask about the history. Some of these are deeply handmade, some are just choices of really cute little items that we’ve found that we wanted to include in the work.
Love
Of – My Grandson and Carrying on Tradition by Making…
Visual Memories From the Generations
Especially for My Grandson – A Christmas Stocking Story by Geema
Before the policy change (you can’t focus on my hairy legs or the white socks (in this case “anklets”)
I get gut-aches when I’m stressed.
I’ve endured a lot of stress, but still, when it is extra bad, I get gut aches. This didn’t start suddenly. I think that this first started when I was about 10 or 11.
Stress starts at home – The parent child struggles
I may have started getting stress like this when I was a kid – maybe I did have those things that I just couldn’t sort out, those conundrums of the day to day, where sometimes my mom tried to help, but when she did – telling me that everything would be alright, most of the time it didn’t turn out that way, and it was the same shit show, different day, every day.
The issue, I’ve since realized, is that my Mom had a very limited concept of my reality. Her oversight and her policies did not fit – like they were created in another decade, more likely to have worked in a small town 15 years prior (or more). We lived in a big city. I would say that it being in the early-1960’s, and being where we lived, the culture was quite different from where my Mom had grown up, with the exception of when she was at university – but she was older then. I think that she should have known better, but, I’m not sure.
Her understanding of my day to day was very limited to the point that sometimes, her rules made my life even more difficult. They got me bullied. Big time.
Because of this situation, I went to extremes, at an early age, to both escape the ridicule that following her rules would bring me, and learning to shape-shift back to appearing to follow her rules by the time I got off the bus each afternoon. This was tricky, as some of the ridicule was dished out by the kids on the bus… to the last minute before I got to my stop. I look back on those days and shiver… Truly.
This was the beginning of the time of my life that I would never want to repeat – grades 6-12. Ok, maybe grade 12, things changed somewhat, but certainly through grade 11. Total living hell.
Yeah – that was me just before fourth grade – that’s how my Mom wanted me to look – maybe forever? Maybe until end of 12th grade? Who knows? Dig the white crew socks that I tried to make look like knee highs, oh, and that hat – those were “a thing” back then!
Back then the policy created by my Mom, that dictated my dress code was: “not allowed to wear make-up” “must wear socks” “not allowed to shave legs, or armpits”.
OK, the situation was that I was well into puberty. I had dark brown hair. My mom tried to dress me like I was in 3rd grade. Even in 3rd grade I didn’t want to wear what she put out for me to wear each day. I became very rebellious. This got me into trouble. Let’s say that we spent a lot of time struggling, but to no avail.
In retrospect, I suspect that these were the seeds of my learning to troubleshoot problems, and build solutions! Put a difficult problem in front of me – given enough time, I’ll figure out the solution!
The daily living hell
As you could imagine, the kids at school made fun of my “hairy legs”, told me I looked ugly (no make-up), called me names that I can’t remember as I have blocked them out of my memory, and of course, wearing the white socks didn’t help with the vision of my hairy legs – complete with the dorky shoes (my Mom insisted I wear “tie up shoes” aka “Oxfords” vs. the ever popular penny-loafers, because they gave me “more arch support”. This was Texas, honey, not Boston! Let’s say that her ideas about fashion for a junior high aged girl were not aligned with reality.
This was the age of the rock and roll emerging from England! Twiggy! Eye-lashes! Mini-skirts! Revlon “Frosted Malt” and “Sugar and Ice” lipstick. Carnaby Street! Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! Hey you, get off of my cloud! You get the picture.
White socks, dorky shoes, hairy legs, no make-up, along with home-made clothes – in a school where how you looked was a top thing of importance – and there was a merciless “in crowd” that relished giving people that didn’t fit their “criteria of looks for acceptance” a cruelty filled hard time.
I’m surprised I didn’t jump out a window or slit my wrists – oh right… we had a one-story house, and I had no access to razors (not allowed to shave my legs or armpits, remember?).
Oh yeah, one last thing – I had achieved the puberty level, and I hadn’t been allowed to wear a bra. That was the icing on the cake.
I walked around thinking, “kill me now.”
Oh, and did I mention that my chunky figure didn’t help? Back then I was also taller than most of the boys, and had my paternal family’s genetics that trended heavy to extremely heavy. Thankfully, mostly, I was just heavy. Chunky, as they called it.
The plan
OK, so what I decided to do, with the aid of some close friends, was to figure out how to (1) buy some lipstick and eyeliner, at least, (2) try to talk my mom into the loafers or at least Keds sneakers, and (3) devise a plan to put on make-up, off load the socks, and get myself together for facing the tough crowd, then (4) unroll all of that at the end of the bus ride home at the last possible moment so that I could blitz off the bus with little attention.
This is what you call, “classic sneaking”. That was the solution that I put into practice and did so for the better part of the last semester of sixth grade. I figured that as long as I didn’t get caught, I could work on my Mom over the summer months to get her to allow me to do those things, and to continue to work on her (badger), enduring the fights that we would have, until I wore her down and got my way.
The Summer Break
Let’s say that this was interesting, and as it turned out, in her counsel with my Dad’s boss’s wife, who had three older teenage girls, the advice to my Mom was, “pick your battles…the ones ahead are going to be much more difficult, and these things you’re insisting on are not helping, and trivial by comparison.”
So, in her fashion of listening to older women, who were financially better off and a member of the right clubs, and whose husband was her husband’s boss, she issued the revised policies for my dress code – finally – before the school session resumed.
Oh, and also, while I was attending church camp. the girls there, “helped” me shave my hairy pits and legs! I got home and synchronicity happened! The rule change + I had already had my first shaving session.
School again
So it went. That part improved, but in seventh grade, more stress emerged. I got gut aches. I got head aches. I had my “monthly” to deal with, that caused more “gut aches”. I was in a swirl. Eventually, I did get used to this – these never went away. My Dad told me about “Tums”. Those helped. But at the end of the day, stress management wasn’t a thing back then. It was just “deal with it the best that you can” oh… and take Tums for the tummy!
Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!- end of seventh grade – chunky monkey – but the belly button showed and NO SOCKS + wore makeup! Dance party – crazy!
Just yesterday, when we were all alive, four generations of women, all related
My grandmother – we all called her “Boo” (not in the above picture) – was one of those quintessential dignified little old ladies whose concept of appearance was rooted in looking presentable whenever she needed to look presentable. She had a process for doing everything and this included making sure that her hair was colored the “right” color of gray. Gray was okay, but it couldn’t be yellow, it had to have the “bluish” cast to it.
Achieving this required the “blue-tint rinse”, as it was explained to me by my mother who answered my curious question: “What’s that on the pillow case – why is it dark-ish?” No doubt my mom was thinking “@#%^!! I have now a pillow case that has to be bleached or it’s ruined!!” but to me she said, “Oh, that’s probably from Boo’s hair dye – just coming off on the pillow case.” Hmmmm…? Little me didn’t really know much about hair dye at that time… Neither Mom or my other grandmother did “hair dye”. Both had dark-ish based hair color, and so they grayed naturally – kind of into a charcoal set of tones. Boo, however, had the thinnish, light brown hair color, originally, that ended up being the gray of the “yellow variety” – not what she desired – hence the need for the “blue tint rinse”.
As a little kid I saw groups of little old ladies at lunch when I was with my grandmother (not Boo), and at times I remember thinking about the varied hues of their gray hair – some kind of went “pink”, some “lilac”, some “blue”, and some stayed yellow if they didn’t have the gift of hair that my grandmother had – the lovely charcoal, wiry, naturally highlighted gray hair…
Here I am, and I haven’t seen my natural hair color in almost 30 years! Crazy as it is, I began to play with hair color when I was in my late 30’s. It was required because I had to do something to feel better during a reinvention period when I had discovered that I had a cheating husband. That is another story for a different day.
But for now, I try to go with it and not stand out too much. I’ve tried going lighter, but I feel like I’m fading. One day I will gently get into my natural state, but I’m not ready yet. My grandson recently told me that I couldn’t be a grandmother because I wasn’t old. I’ll keep that remark. Out of the mouths of babes…
