A Christmas Memory

I trace my love of cocktailing to a Christmas party my parents had when I was around four. We lived in a big brick house on Sycamore Street in Louisville, Kentucky, the same street my mom grew up on. We had a cedar tree that year that almost touched the ceiling and shimmered with icicles.

It was the sixties. Dad, he looked like the actor Tab Hunter, classic Ivy League good looks, although he never went to college. He was wearing a dark suit with a skinny tie and drinking a highball and talking to Uncle Steve who was married to Aunt Judy, my mom’s little sister. Aunt Judy was the only other person besides my mother that I would leave the house with and not throw a Grade A temper tantrum. My mom had her glossy dark hair teased up at the crown and flipped out at the ends, kind of like Jackie Kennedy, and wore a shiny silver pencil dress with ¾ sleeves. She held her cigarette between her fingers, hand cocked, her smoking elbow resting on her other hand. I thought she looked glamourous.

Everyone was either smoking or drinking cocktails and chatting away and the record player was spinning something groovy and I just couldn’t help myself. I came running out from the hall, where I’d been spying on them, and broke into a hula in my pajamas right there in the middle of the living room. Man, my dad, he just busted out laughing. “Do that again, babe.”

All of the sudden I realized all of the adults were staring down at me, smiling and waiting for me to perform. I felt like Snoopy in A Charlie Brown Christmas, when Schroeder was playing a lively jazz number and Snoopy gets caught up in the moment and starts dancing exuberantly on Schroeder’s piano, kicking his legs out like a Russian dancer, and then Schroeder stops playing and he and Lucy just stare at Snoopy. Like Snoopy, my face turned bright red and I slunk out of the scene of my humiliation to my bedroom without saying a word.

Nevertheless, the joie de vivre of that Christmas memory stuck.

Photo: Poor old young dad with four kids, probably nursing a hangover from Christmas cocktailing.