1. My very first memory is a Christmas memory. I was two and three-quarters, in the words of a 1967 me. My father, a Lieutenant Commander in the Navy, was in Vietnam. My mother was at St. Luke’s Hospital, giving birth to her third child and first son. Teenage boy cousins spent the day with my sister and me playing with our new Tinker Toys, while our grandparents drank Manhattans and cried.

2. Every year, my mother asked me for the same gifts: nail polish and nylons.

3. We four kids got so much loot the boxes often spilled out of the living room, into the hall. One year, we each got a bike. Another year, we each got a television.

4. My brother gets wound up for his Christmas birthday. When he was 6, he stopped talking altogether just after Thanksgiving. If you asked him a question, he’d just blink. He still gets the blinks, even though he’s in his forties and works at a bank.

5. For Christmas dinner, we always had 13 people, although my dad insisted we say we had “12 and Eleanor.” He wasn’t really superstitious, and Eleanor wasn’t really a relative. She was a friend of Gram and Puppa. She gave great sweaters from Filene’s to us kids until we got too old, or she got too old, and then she gave us each two crisp twenties. Which was a lot of money in the ’70s. Her contributions to my holiday happiness were worth a bit of bad juju.

6. The menu varied little from Thanksgiving. Dad made the turkey and the stuffing. Mom made the mashed potatoes, butternut squash, and creamed onions. Our cranberry sauce came out of a can and was served in circular slices. We always had birthday cake. Gram and Puppa brought rum balls.

7. One Christmas morning, Gram couldn’t wake Puppa up.

8. Among my all-time favorite presents are a Tiffany Taylor doll whose scalp spun so she could be blonde one moment and brunette the next; a chemistry set; Barbie’s jet plane; and a pair of chameleons in a glass terrarium. The chameleons were a short-lived pleasure. The cat ate them before Epiphany.

9. When my niece was two and three quarters, the tree fell on her. Lots of drama, no injury.

10.This year, we’ll celebrate Christmas day at my brother’s house. There’ll be 17 at the table. Puppa’s gone, Gram’s gone, my mom is gone. We’ll eat turkey, revel in gifts, laugh a lot, and probably drink a few Manhattans. It’s only one day a year, but we pack a lot of living into it.

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Wendy Darwin Wakeman writes from Massachusetts, where she lives with her husband and daughter.