Mom, ten years later

Today marks the tenth anniversary of my mother’s death. She went to bed on the night of November 11, 2014 and died in her sleep. I discovered her the following evening. Each year I write a tribute which is usually accompanied by a Christmas story, since we were both Christmas early birds who loved to decorate and look at the seasonal merchandise for sale in early November. I have already started baking my mother’s shortbreads. This afternoon I finished decorating my Christmas tree. Having it up so early is a record for me, and I wouldn’t have started so soon if I wasn’t going to be having two guests staying with me from this Friday to next Monday. I’d love to have my house decorated for them so as of right now I only have the tree up.

My tree theme this year is “Christmas 1970”. I have recreated the Christmas tree that we put up 54 years ago in our East York basement apartment. The only difference is that our 1970 tree was real; mine is artificial. My mother saved every ornament from that time and I still have them. I arranged them in exactly the same haphazard positions. The lights are the same C7 solid bulbs (not LED’s or retro-style LED’s). Step into my living room and enter a time machine. It is messing with my head, regressing 54 years like this, but I am back in junior kindergarten again when I look at it. How my mother would have loved decorating that tree with me. As we sorted the branches she would have told stories from the time when we used to live on Hopedale Avenue. We always put up my tree together, from the time I got my first big tree when I moved into my townhouse in 2002 until her last Christmas with us in 2013. When my house is all decorated I will take pictures and post side-by-side shots of the 1970 tree with the 2024 tree.

I have gone through my vast collection of photos of my mother, which I inherited from her and which she inherited from her own father, and chosen some special ones to honour her today. Let’s start with the earliest ones:

Baby Gloria held by her mother, my Grandma Chase. My mother was born on April 12, 1940.

The writing on the back of this photo states that it was taken on Sunday, December 28, 1941. My mother was not yet two. The baby picture of my mother which is at the height of the treetop is now in my living room.

Little Gloria wishing you a Happy New Year on January 1, 1943

December 25, 1943

My mother with Santa on December 15, 1944. Those white eyebrows would have scared the daylights out of me.

My mother and father on September 14, 1958. My mother was eighteen and my father had just celebrated his nineteenth birthday.

This photo is undated and without any information on the back, yet I suspect that judging from my mother’s headpiece, it may be from a Valentine’s Day dance.

Just married, September 7, 1963

Cutting the wedding cake

Christmas sometime in the late seventies. If I zoom in on the tree, I can see the kinds of decorations we used back then. The small ball striped red (to the right of the partridge above my head) is one of the Christmas 1970 balls.

My mother with her own mother, my Grandma Chase, on November 12, 1996. They are at my grandmother’s house in Scarborough.

My mother with her best friend Shirley and Shirley’s daughter Tammy

My mother with her brother Gary and his wife Lynda at Christmastime in the 2010’s

My mother’s last Christmas, in 2013. I noticed the similarities in the pattern of her top and the wrapping paper.