The following essay has been written especially for Mommybloggers by our featured blogger, Mamacita.

When I remember the Christmases of my childhood, I smile. The perfection of everything. . . the huge tree. . . . the crèche. . . . the cookies. . . . the family reunion. . . . the presents. . . . it was so glowing and wonderful I can barely describe it without weeping. My sisters and brother and I, all in new pajamas, would come running in. . . .Everything was always the same, at Christmas, year after year. That was part of the perfection of it.

Then I grew up and became cool.

The first Christmas Hub and I were married, I wanted things to be as different from the way Mom always did them as possible. HER traditions were silly and redundant. I vowed to make all my own traditions, and not bother with any of her old-fashioned ways. I mean, she used the exact same ornaments year after year, and some of them had been made by my siblings and me when we were children, and those crumbling glitter-encrusted ‘things’ were so uncool and embarrassing! I wanted Christmas in my new household to be trendy and cool, nontraditional in every way, a Christmas such as those I’d read about in magazines. I even refused to make cut-out sugar cookies, because Mom always did. I made marzipan. (Nobody liked it.)

This changed after Belle was born. Suddenly, it wasn’t just Christmas I was planning. It was Christmas for a child. My whole attitude changed. My outlook changed. Everything had changed, because my life’s focus had changed.

It was coming on Christmas, and there was a child in the house now. With a rush that left me gasping, all the things Mom had done for us as kids became important and absolutely inviolably necessary.

Stocking? I chose her stocking with care, because she would be using the same one all her life.

Tree-topper? I chose that with care, too. It would have to last forever, lest the image of the tree be distorted. Our tree-topper is, by the way, an angel. Her name is Fifi.

Placement of various little Christmas knick-knacks, etc? I had to find the perfect places for them all, knowing in the back of my mind that everything would have to be put in those same perfect places from now on.

Christmas Eve? Same routine every year. Christmas morning? Same. Christmas afternoon? Same. If something came along to disrupt, I came unglued.

I tried so hard to recreate Mom’s Christmases. In many ways, I succeeded. Hers, plus mine, plus ‘stuff,’ equals our Christmas.

It took several years for me to learn a very important lesson. Christmas routine is very important to a child, but the world will not stop turning if something happens to upset or interrupt that routine. I think sometimes that ‘routine’ is more important to the parents. A child is a lot more versatile that we give her credit for. A child can DEAL with a little change in a holiday routine a lot better than her mother can. Once this mommy caught on to that, things lightened up a little.

Even now, I try to recreate as many of “Mom’s ways� at Christmas, as is possible. In the beginning, with no budget to speak of , it was pretty hard.

Those first Christmases with one, then two, children, were so moneyless and meager, I cried myself to sleep several Christmas Eves in a row because I couldn’t do for my children all that I wanted to do. Imagine my shock, when my now-grown children’s memories of those Christmases included cookies, crèches, presents, reunions, food. . . . everything but the desperation that had so entrenched Mommy and that she assumed would be the primary memory of the kids! They hadn’t even noticed the small amount of presents; they had just noticed that there WERE presents! They didn’t care that the cookies were made with one egg instead of two; they only remembered cutting them out and sprinkling food-coloring-laced sugar on them and eating them. They had never even noticed that when we stopped at the gas station before driving down to the family reunion, we counted out nickels and dimes and pennies to the attendant.

Their memories are of Christmas, not of near-poverty. They never saw the improvised attempts to make something out of nothing. They saw new pajamas; they didn’t see the scraps of Mommy’s only long nightgown in the trash. They saw candles; they didn’t see Gulfwax chunks tied together with twine. They saw Santa’s footprint in the living room; they didn’t see Hub’s big boot dipped in flour. They didn’t see mousetracks; they saw nibbles in the cookie left for Santa. They didn’t see a five-dollar tree with huge gaps that even tinsel wouldn’t fill; they saw the biggest and more awesome Christmas tree in the world.

What’s my point here? I dunno. Maybe it’s that children see the world with a different sort of perspective. I worried so much that my children would not have a good Christmas, that they would see what I was seeing, and what I was seeing was pretty bleak. Fortunately, my children were much smarter than I was. Where I was seeing desperation, they were seeing lights and presents and ribbons. Where I was seeing makeshift, they were seeing wonder.

Where I remember hard times, my children remember Christmas.

I asked Mom about some of her traditions the other day. She told me that most of them were born of no money and desperation and her insistence on having a memorable Christmas for us kids in spite of everything.

She asked me what I remembered about those Christmases.

I smiled.

Read more by the wonderful Mamacita at her blog Scheiss Weekly!