Christmas 1993

Christmas over the years has varied quite considerably when it comes to the company I share it with. Currently it’s a small affair with only the most immediate of family as a consequence of the awkward mid-generational gap. Most of my side of the family moved to warmer climate a few years back, and most of the other side are either elderly or have their own Brady-Bunch-esque family mashups to deal with. And even before that, there was the unintentional drift that happens after you move out.

I have sort of found that there is a three-generation maximum to gatherings where the grandparents can sort of preside over the aunts and uncles who do most of hustle and bustle in terms of cooking and cleaning, while the grandkids mill around with few expectations or responsibilities other than playing video games or shooting water pipes in the basement (true story that I will share one day, but that’s a Thanksgiving tale, so not now).

But then as the grandchildren grow and forge their own families, dynamics come into play where one has to balance a doubling of the holiday responsibilities and attendance, ultimately leading to a choice where you have to pick one side of the family or set out on your own. Then the saga continues…Wu-Tang, Wu-Tang…

So this leads me back to my earlier point about being in the middle of the transition, as the hand-off between the elder generations has come a bit too premature, and we’re a short ways off between future additions adding to the holiday assembly. Not that I’m rushing life along for the sake of the comforting gatherings of old, but there is a bit of a void where rampant chaos once was.

Luckily for me, I had two things going for me. The first was my handy Video8 camcorder that was hot glued to my hands from when I got it and then throughout the following years, and the second was the forethought to capture this fragile tape-based media onto something digital. In 2005, after some failed attempts at using my computer to capture footage, the newly accessible DVD+R recorders did a decent job of the task with minimal fuss. I attempted to take a second pass a few years ago using some HD capture devices, but by then the tapes were just in terrible shape, so glorious MPEG-2 is where we will stay. Truth be told, it’s not all bad, and most of the artifacts here are from re-encoding to MP4, then processing on Youtube, and then downloading that file to get screenshots. Digital is good for making exact copies, but any transformations beyond that are just horrid. I suppose a third thing that would be necessary would be ensuring that all copies have adequate backups, but we’re 500 words in and I haven’t really dug into the memories as of yet, so enough rambling.

Said camcorder was a reward, or perhaps an apology, for babysitting my sister all summer while my dad finished work on the house we had just built. The major flaw was that they gave it to me at the beginning of the summer rather than waiting until the completion of my task, so with the goods in hand, my sister was on her own in her room while we recorded random skits and a 52 episode variety show in my bedroom.

More on that in another article, but despite the idle filming projects that killed time in the summer, the camera played a role that Christmas when my parents requested that I record some events. The first was my sister’s pre-school play, for which I had to skip school. Normally that would be a win for most, but it spoiled my perfect attendance that year, and despite no real love for school, my OCD just became rather annoyed at that blemish on my record.

The next event was more of a fly-on-the-wall recording of the grand family gathering during the nearest adjacent weekend to Christmas where the aforementioned three-generational crew would meet, eat, and swap presents. This year was different too. Normally we weren’t the ones to host, as most of the family was out of state…or rather we were out of state, and it normally made more sense for our single family to travel rather than the other three. But the house was new, and after the finishing touches over the summer, it was ready to showcase. Looking back at the footage, I see how much was still yet to be finished, but the necessary bits like…floors…were in place at least.

At the end I will include the two-ish minute long supercut of the video, which was inspired mainly by AVGN and his edit from one of his birthday parties where only the most absurd moments remain. The original is almost nine-minutes, and most of the reduction was achieved simply by cutting out the shaky-cam and blurry footage. The slice-of-life approach to the recording led to a lot of half-captured conversations, lack of focus, and an overall unwatchable mess that I wouldn’t have any other way. There was little control over the flow of the recording aside from rewinding the tape and trying again, but that was saved for only the most drastic of mistakes. What we’re left with is a stream of consciousness that permanently encapsulates what is to have a horde of family all under the same roof for a few hours.

It begins with one of the few shots that shows our cat, Spike, a seal-point Siamese who we lost the following summer, so that alone makes this recording special. I’ll always remember her as a rather small cat, but that’s mainly due to the fact that she never got the opportunity to grow into a full adult. I believe she was only a few months old here, and I adore that perfect circle she was able to curl into. Not sure why we had a crib in the living room, and right next to the wood stove, but that’s the least confusing thing to observe as we continue.

And speaking of confusing, I can be heard talking about Birthday presents, but that’s due to one cousin having the sad unfortunate luck of being born in December, which naturally leads to sub-par presents in that regard since most people are strapped for money after buying the dozen family members something, combined with the general hazy line between the two gift-giving opportunities. I do recall that my mom tried to take time out to give him his birthday gift separately, and even asked that I don’t record it, since this was a Christmas video, and we needed to sever all connections for that briefest of times.

Now the food was a reliable constant throughout the years. I’m pretty sure once I ever get done organizing and scanned my old photo boxes, that we’ll see the same dishes appear season after season. Glazed ham, twice-baked potatoes, and some vegetable that no one ate. Dessert was usually a fudge with multi-colored marshmallows, cut into squares so big, you needed to contact Wilford Brimley afterwards and get your diabetes testing supplies.

While the food stayed the same, we did have a different approach to eating. Traditionally we would all sit down and share the meal, but though I mentioned that we indeed now had floors, we didn’t really have much in the way of tables. So it was an anarchistic free-for-all where you would grab a polystyrene plate and eat while standing, just as things would be if men ruled the world.

At this point, my dad took over the filming. He would often commandeer the camera without much regard to what point the tape was at, or if I was in the middle of something that didn’t need footage of the garbage men sifting through the neighbor’s trash. But here, I was able to sit back and not be stuck behind the viewfinder for the entire event, so it was a welcome reprieve.

This led to zoom-ins on my new Uncle’s bald head, my other aunt and uncle trying to figure out how to load an—actual—film camera, and gratuitous shots of coffee. The lens cap was on at times, the focus was woefully missing its mark, and at one point all the footage was upside down. Although I must confess to that transgression, and no it wasn’t a mistake. I was just being ‘quirky’.

And despite quite a bit of the video displaying some visual evidence of otherwise forgotten memories, there was still the off-camera audio that captured things that added to the moment. My grandfather announcing that he was going to claim a chair and sit there until he was kicked out. My aunt wondering why we named a tiny Siamese cat, Spike. My sister having no idea what my dad was asking for, over the myriad of conversations.

I assume at some point, the camera was abandoned, and we were able to live in the moment—something I have to try and force myself to do in modern times with the ubiquity of mobile phones and whatnot. Camcorders were bulky, and once you recorded the footage, no one really bothered to watch it again. The shadows sat on tape for years until you looked back and realized that the family hasn’t gotten together that year…or the next… New familial configurations appear and become the norm, but if it weren’t for the grainy, blurring, shaken, loud, muffled, and haphazard recording, then those times would slowly fade away.

Which is my segue into reminding you to make backups of everything. Take one thing away from this article at least.

But wait! There’s more!

Well not too much. I still had some other footage from that December. The kid’s party at my dad’s university apparently felt the need for furries and giant gingerbread house that the attendees tore into with unmatched ferocity. I remember kids walking around with giant cookie walls tucked under their arms.

Then there’s the clip of my brother doing a song routine, using our musical Christmas Tree lights as the melodic backdrop. After I get done archiving my film photos, I hope in future articles to cover our various trees, since we consistently had the absolute worst ones possible. The kicker here are those musical lights that were dying from the moment we took them out of the box. The speaker warbled and cracked, begging to be put out of its misery as it dribbled out ‘We Wish You a Merry Christmas’.

Well that’s it for now. Hopefully the personal posts don’t alienate too many, because I have an endless supply of content that predates the median reader’s lifespan by a factor of three-fold or so. Hopefully I can get another one finished before the big day in order to justify the custom header and garish CSS that I made for this.