Christmas at Grandma’s in the ‘90s

Hello! This isn’t in one of my books (not at the moment at least), but it is about writing. I’m always trying to be a better writer, and part of that is reading books about the craft of writing. Right now I’m reading Description and Setting. One of the exercises they want us to do is write a description of a scene from more than ten years ago. So for that, I’m writing about my grandma’s house at Christmas in the 1990s. It’s not really about any specific year, although I may post about one specific Christmas later on.

Grandma’s home at Christmas was always cozy.

I always spent the most time in her living room. In the center of the room sat a rug made of hand-braided rags, over a hardwood floor. The rug was older than I was, and was full of dirt, dog and cat hair from decades of pets and children playing on the floor with Legos or Lincoln Logs.

At the edges of the room sat a red velvet couch. A wooden table sat in front of that, with a knitting magazine, book on Pompeii, and a catalog with educational products like tapes to learn Russian or other languages. The matching red velvet reclining chair was Grandpa’s; he would sit on it in his greasy striped workshirt after a long day of work, sometimes even on Christmas. It was his chair.

The Christmas tree stood in the corner, with tinsel strewn from its sparse branches. Glass balls, lights, and a star at the top completed the decoration.

The blue drapes were opened, revealing sheer white curtains and the light from the day. Opposite to the window stood the piano and Grandpa’s desk.

The desk was cluttered with all the tools necessary to run his business, including two phones: one blue, one red. The blue one was for the business, while the red one was for personal calls. They were rented from the phone company, probably since the house was built, even though you could buy telephones in stores now. They probably paid for the phones dozens of times over in rental fees over the years.

The piano was open to a book of Christmas tunes, that my brother and I would attempt to play, although since we never took any piano lessons, we certainly weren’t virtuosos. It probably hadn’t been tuned in decades, although we couldn’t tell. There was one key that played an obvious discordant note.

The house was heated by a black wood-fed stove next to the kitchen. We’d show up on Christmas morning to find our stockings, which would be filled with things like a candy cane, an orange, a couple pieces of chocolate, and a pair of work gloves.

A twenty-four inch TV sat on a wooden stand near the wall by the Christmas tree. It was a fairly recent purchase, color, replacing the thirteen-inch black and white TV that had been kept in the dining room previously. It was a big, boxy television. It was smaller than normal TVs at the time, and didn’t take advantage of the new flat-screen technology coming online, but it was a huge technological leap from what she had been using. Although Grandma would soon get cable, for now, she still watched with the rabbit-ear antennas in the back. Two knobs spun to select the channels, like in the olden days.

As we waited for Christmas dinner to be set on the table, the delicious smells wafted through the air. Grandma would always serve Christmas dinner on cranberry-colored plates and cups. I don’t remember her taking these out any other time of year. The rest of the time we’d usually drink out of plastic Tupperware cups.

It wasn’t until years later that I realized they were multi-millionaires.

The book encourages us to practice writing descriptions, so hopefully I’ll get better at it.