If you’re feeling nostalgic about the holidays, you probably still can’t match the nostalgia of baby boomer Heather Summerhayes Cariou. Every year, she feels like she has encountered The Sweet Ghost of Christmas Past (and at the end, she takes “sweet” to a new level).

We wrote letters to “Santa Claus, care of Hengerer’s Department Store in Buffalo,” hoping Forgetful the Elf would read them on channel 7 TV. We eagerly awaited the first snow, each morning standing on tiptoe on our beds, craning our faces up to the window, anxious for the frosty miracle to occur.

The best part of Christmas, though, was the shortbread my mother, sister, and I baked into buttery gold that melted in our mouths. Every year we opened the old red Purity Flour Cookbook to the familiar dog-eared recipe page, smeared with our fingerprints from holidays past. We dug out the Christmas music and played it all day while we chopped and mixed and measured. We sang carols, fueling ourselves with raw cookie dough and tea. We licked our fingers, green and red from sugar sprinkles, sticky with icing, and we laughed.

We cherished this ritual, though it was bittersweet. You see, we never knew from year to year if each Christmas would be my sister’s last. She had been diagnosed with Cystic Fibrosis at the age of four. Yet buoyed by a determination to never give up, Pam was able to share our Christmas ritual well into our young adulthood.

When her last Christmas came, she was just shy of her 26th birthday. I remember how she sat at the end of the kitchen table, tethered to her then ever-present oxygen tank. The plastic oxygen mask covered her nose and mouth. Her shoulders rounded forward, rising and falling with the tide of her breath, riding an ocean of fatigue. Still, she pulled hope along on the end of every labored breath. She creamed the butter in the big yellow mixing bowl, chopped the red and green maraschino cherries, and filled with delight, licked her sticky-sweet fingers, looked at me, and laughed.

In that moment as in many others, Pam taught me both the necessity and power of creating joy in the midst of adversity. She believed that every day and every relationship could be a gift if we looked at it that way.

“If we take the chance of seeking out beauty in the world about us, every moment of every day can be treasured,” she once said. “I have learned that no matter what misfortunes or joys one may be faced with, life will surely go on … with love.”

I’ve honored my sister’s legacy by becoming a warrior on behalf of my own life, framing every experience I can with love, creating joy where I am able, and adopting her motto, “Never Give Up!”

This year as always I’ll spend a day in December enjoying the ritual baking of shortbread cookies. Stars, holly, and angels to melt in your mouth like buttered gold. I’ll listen to the Mormon Tabernacle Choir and Bing Crosby. I’ll fuel myself through the afternoon with strong tea and raw cookie dough. Pam will be there with me in my heart, sharing her love, courage, faith, and her sparkling, contagious laughter. Together, we’ll make Christmas come alive once more.

Here now: the Purity Flour Cookbook Christmas Shortbread Recipe
2 Cups butter, softened
1 Cup Icing sugar or Brown Sugar (I use 1⁄2 and 1⁄2)
1⁄4 tsp. Vanilla
4 cups flour

Cream butter with vanilla and sugar. Mix in flour a cup at a time. Split dough into two batches. Roll one batch out onto floured surface and cut with cookie cutters. Repeat with second batch. Decorate with colored sprinkles and/or chopped maraschino cherries. Bake for ten minutes at 350 degrees.

Heather Summerhayes Cariou’s book is Sixtyfive Roses.

Wishing I were Marlo Thomas or Mary Tyler Moore, I took to wearing a cheap dynel “fall”, a wig that fell straight to my shoulders from a black velvet headband, curling at the ends into a neat flip. Purchased with a postdated check, without my mother’s permission, I snuck it out of the house every morning in a brown paper bag, furtively bobby-pinning it to my scalp in the school bathroom.

Flinging the shiny strands of fake hair from my shoulders and puffing with mannered gestures on my cigarettes, I sat long hours at the donut shop with my friends from the Drama Club, bragging that someday I was getting out of this town, I was going to Broadway and hitting it big. I drank innumerable cups of coffee, extra light with two packs of sugar, and wrote Rod McKuen rip-off poetry on paper napkins.

Out of the corner
of my eye
i see myself
in that dark corner
huddled all curled up afraid
of all the people and the light

but when i turn to face myself
my image disappears
and i stand looking
into empty corners
all the time …

The postdated check cleared the bank prior to the automatic deposit from my part-time job at Woolco. When the check bounced, the bank phoned my mother. I found this out after I was yanked out of history class and hauled down to the nurse’s office to take my mother’s call. My heart pounded and my hand went clammy on the receiver as I said hello. Having been told only that it was an emergency, I expected to hear that Pam had been rushed to the hospital. Instead my mother began to rant that young women who bounced checks to purchase forbidden hairpieces were headed for a life of crime. I gritted my teeth. She had a good mind to call the police, she said, and send them right over to arrest me. My eyes turned hot and wet.

“Is there anything wrong?” asked the nurse when I hung up.

“It’s my sister,” I lied.

“Oh dear. I hope she’ll be all right.”

By the time I got home from school a modicum of reason had prevailed, and my parents settled for house arrest. My reaction was by now, standard.

“I HATE you,” I screamed, blasting up the stairs to my room in tears, slamming the door in my usual fashion, this time so hard it blew through the frame and stuck so that I couldn’t get back out.

“Good,” said my father, surveying the damage from the other side of the door, “you can stay in there ‘til you’ve had a chance to think things through.”

My sister understood better than anyone what had happened and why, and it was she who rescued me, prying the door open with a screwdriver.

“I don’t know why you bought that stupid wig in the first place.”

“Because, I’m ugly.”

“No you’re not,” she said. “You just think you are.”

Available at Amazon: Sixtyfive Roses: A Sister’s Memoir