Christmas, Lost and Remembered

Christmas to us kids was about giving the prettiest Christmas card to the girl you secretly adored but would never admit or even let her know.  Well I don't think if I ever had one--I still can't admit it, I am just that shy.  You also exchanged cards with all your friends but that's just to cover up and divert others from the only card you ever truly wanted to give.  That was a time when nobody had yet discovered a make-up festival called Valentine's Day which was so designed by merchants to make money and to make all the singletons weep.  So Christmas was the only big day for us kids, to have some fun exchanging tacky cards with even tackier handwritten messages like "Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!" no matter the card had that same exact message already printed in the front and the fact that we saw each other every day.  Of course all these crazy card exchanges within a classroom of some forty pupils began in early December and ran on till the climactic festive finale that was our grand Christmas party production in our make-shift auditorium inside our seedy school.  I don't remember back then if I knew of, let alone sent or received any Hallmark or any import fancy cards that actually broadcast class and taste.  All I remember were glitters, lots of them.  Looking back, they were kind of cool in their own silly tacky way.  You know whenever you look back in time you kind of look through things with a nostalgic filter which invariably aestheticizes and makes everything oddly beautiful.  Me and my sisters gathered our stacks of Christmas cards from friends and relatives and hopefully secret admirers, and hung them up on some strings we so artfully arranged on our window so they garlanded like a Christmas tree, only there wasn't any real Christmas tree except strings of Christmas cards with glitters and childish blessings.  We lived in a crammed apartment in a neighborhood where people had very modest means.  But Christmas was the time of the year every window from every household wanted to look its best or richest: that would be a small plastic fantastic Christmas tree with lightings! The decoration was so good nobody wanted to ever take it down until some months later,  when an even greater festival, so mega and so important that deserved and demanded the Japanese NHK Red and White Song Contest broadcast, Chinese New Year came along.  I still love and yearn for Christmas cards, with or without glitters.