There were two annual holidays that my mother adored and went all out for: Thanksgiving and Christmas. These were traditions she had always celebrated during her life in America, and she carried on after we moved to New Zealand.

Mom always had a real Christmas tree. She loved the smell and the atmosphere it created. The tree stood in an old galvanised bucket, securely held up by a foundation of bricks wedging it into its tinny home, and was watered daily over the holiday time.

The bucket was cleverly concealed by an old beige-coloured blanket spread around the base of the tree. Presents were cast around, many not appearing until Christmas morning because when my sister and I were younger, we liked to feel, shake, and sniff the gifts to determine their contents. Mom hated it when we guessed. The element of delightful surprise was something she coveted when giving her presents.  A dead giveaway was the scent of lemon from Yardley's lemon-soap-on-a-rope, or the rattle of hard boiled sweets in a tin.

A succession of our cats were intrigued by the decorations on the tree: lights, bright baubles, hanging decorations we'd collected over the years, many handmade and special. Mom treasured two of these in particular: two little Christmas cardboard wreaths, with tiny red bows stuck on the top and a selection of hard pasta shapes (bows and macaroni) glued on then the whole thing sprayed with glimmering gold paint. My sister and I had made these at kindergarten.  One of our kittens managed to secure mine around its ear, and several cats ate the tinsel with interesting outcomes (none fatal). 

Mom put up her 'nativity scene' each year. This had been handed down through the generations of her family and was purported to have German origins. It looked like it'd been around for ages: the animals, particularly the camels belonging to the Three Wise Men, had a moth eaten look and one had a broken leg that had been glued on backwards. One Christmas, Mom caught me chewing on baby Jesus' soft foot (I was two or three) so it looked forever mangled and strange. My sister and I added a few plastic dinosaurs from her prehistoric dino set and I threw in a couple of horsemen and three fierce Indians from my Fort Apache cavalry set, something Mom wasn't too keen on but allowed nonetheless. Playing with the nativity scene and chasing Mother Mary around the manger with a T Rex was a good way to investigate the wrapped presents laying about.

And then there was the food. My mother was a wonderful cook and there was always turkey with all the trimmings, and her world-famous whipped cream salad. This was a delicious concoction of tinned fruits and marshmallows mixed up with whipped cream and served with the turkey. Whipped cream and turkey gravy is a taste sensation I remember to this very day. There were mashed sweet potatoes topped with marshmallow and baked in the oven, mashed plain potatoes, peas with mushrooms that had been sauteed in butter, cranberry sauce, cooked carrots sliced in rounds, plus soft warm bread rolls all followed by dessert, usually pie, perhaps apple, or pecan, and a Christmas cake, all made by Mom.

I think Mom could never quite adjust to having Christmas during the heat of summer. North American Christmases were easier when it came to cooking all this stuff: it was cold, turning on the oven to bake turkeys and pies was warming and cosy. So, to help Mom cope better with the Southern Hemisphere climate, we had our main dinner on Christmas Eve with leftovers on Christmas Day.

Mom's Christmas Eve dinners were major family events and included people we knew who no longer had family or who were away from home for the holidays. Our table was loaded with food and plenty, and we'd often have two or three guests joining us and this gave a real festive air to the occasion.

A regular guest for Christmas was Mary, (pictured above right - Mom is wearing the straw hat) an older woman who had lost her husband some years before. They'd had no children, she was on her own and always came to stay with us for a few days. She was a dear friend of Mom and Dad's. 

Mary was short and wiry with coal black hair, large blue eyes, big sunglasses, always wore bright red lipstick and drove a huge, white Jaguar with a big cushion behind her back so she could reach the pedals and see over the dash. Mary was quick, nervous, jumpy as a cat, and shared Mom's love of martinis so her arrival on Christmas Eve was greatly anticipated. As soon as Mary came through the door, the pitcher, ice and booze were out and they were mixing (unlike James Bond, their martinis were stirred, not shaken). Fortunately the food had been prepared, the table set with the special Christmas red tablecloth, the family silverware and silver goblets, and the Haviland china plates, serving dishes and platters that only came out on 'special' occasions.      

When I was 19, my family moved to an old, 100-year-old rundown house in Torbay, just north of Auckland. As the story went, this place had been the homestead of a timber baron whose rough-hewn logs floated down the creek at the bottom of our section to ships waiting in the bay. It had a wide covered verandah running along the front and spacious overgrown gardens and grounds that went down a hill to the creek.

When we moved in, there were booby traps along the verandah (rotted holes in the decking concealed by meandering wisteria, big enough to fall through), animals residing in the roof (possums in the little sleep out that was only hanging onto the end of the house by a wisteria root), a bathroom with a rotting floor (indeed one visitor who attended one of the all-night parties my sister and I used to have with regularity (the creepy old house lent itself beautifully to such debauchery) decided to sleep in the massive old bathtub and it fell through the floor with an almighty crash during the early hours of the morning and she slept through the whole incident, as did everyone else; we had to lift her up about three feet from the tub back up into the house), and rodents that came into the house at night to pooh in our slippers (large water rats from the creek and a multitude of mice). For a while we had a goat called Dr Vivvy who rambled freely in the 'lower 40' down by the creek until he ate all the grass and was moved on.    

Dad set to and fixed up a lot of the house, as was the intention when they bought the place, and finally it was fit for 'company' as Mom called our more discerning visitors, like Mary. So up she drove one Christmas Eve, managing to get the massive Jag up the narrow concrete ribbons of driveway without skidding off into the bamboo, a common occurrence for visitors.

We had a cat at the time called Critter. She was a marmalade-coloured manic nutter who used to pick the tinsel off the tree with aplomb and eat it with no lasting ill effects. Critter was adept at catching mice and her killing field was beneath the dining table.

One Christmas Eve dinner we were all seated enjoying our Christmas cheer, Mom and Mary particularly pink-cheeked after their martinis. My sister and I sat at one end of the table with a view of the room beyond and we were chowing down on our delicious food when my sister nudged me under the table, directing my vision to Critter who was entering the room with her festive gift strung out along her chops, tiny tail twitching. We heaved a mutual sigh of relief that it wasn't a water rat but were nonetheless on edge as we knew Critter + rodent were heading under the table to set up camp beside someone's feet, but whose?

Cats always seem to gravitate towards those who aren't keen on them. Mary wasn't a cat fan, saying she was allergic but I think it was more her natural disposition: cats jumping about and slinking around jangled her already tight, twanging nerves.  We saw Critter's tail disappear under the table, making a feline beeline for Mary's red-slippered feet.

Mom had noticed my sister and I looking somewhat secretly amused, gave us her eyebrow-raised-look of 'behave yourselves, we have company, I'm warning you'   (aka as 'the look') and I was able to mouth 'Critter' to her and that was all I had to do.

My mother was born in the American South, raised with impeccable manners, smooth and cool in any crisis, and hospitality in her home on Christmas Eve was top priority. She carefully dabbed her mouth with the cloth napkin and as she replaced it in her lap, she let it swish to the floor so she could lean over and peek under the table. As she emerged again, her eyes darted to her left where Mary was sitting. That meant Critter had established a beach head at our guest's feet. Mary continued to chat away, entertaining us with stories about her recent travels and adventures with her 'Sunshine Group' of elderly travelers - she was forever getting entangled in 'the unexpected' - and her stories were 'tall' and hilarious when fueled with a martini or two. 

I couldn't resist dropping my napkin on the floor and scrambled about down there for a while, watching Critter happily chewing away on her prize, nestled comfortably into the V between Mary's soft shoes. I popped up and my sister ducked down, coming up again with a loud smirk that was met with 'the look'.

Critter's way of demolishing a rodent was thus: she would kill it, eat the body and tail, save the head for last. Her encore was to bite down on the head with one good chomp and then leave that under the table as a trophy for us to pick up later. As far as we knew, she was true to form, eating up her Christmas dinner. We knew what was coming and it came in a lull in the conversation, as such things usually do. There was a discernible 'crack' as she made her last bite.

Mom did not flinch, Mary looked a little puzzled. Dad's hearing has never been good so he just kept on eating. I filled my mouth with whipped cream salad and my sister coughed loudly to cover her laugh.

Mom said with the grace and calm born of her Southern heritage, 'Oh my Lord! I am sorry. That was my tricky jaw. It pops out now and then.' 

Mary laughed and continued her travel story. I dropped my napkin again to see what was going on and saw Mary unknowingly kick the mouse head under Dad's foot. He stood on it and carried on chewing a turkey bone. 

'Dessert anyone?' Mom asked.

 © Jane Bissell 2018 'The Book about Mom'