CONTENTS UNDER PRESSURE: SPIRITS OF CHRISTMAS USUALLY FRIENDLY

Charles Dickens notwithstanding, the ghosts of Christmas Past are usually friendly.

Mine are anyway, and at a time of year when we're all remembering family and friends, I don't mind the occasional haunting.

It's hard to predict what exactly will summon these spirits or what will scare them away, so when they make themselves known, they are especially welcome.

The other night I was getting ready for a friend's Christmas party -- the grown-up kind that requires sparkles and sequins and other celebratory trim -- when I realized, as usual, that none of the many pairs of earrings I own were suitable for the (borrowed) sequined jacket I wore.

I'm more a tweed-and-cultured pearls kind of woman, myself. Glitz confuses me.

At any rate, I was digging through my jewelry box, rejecting this pair as too businesslike and that pair as too casual, when I opened the last drawer.

Panic was giving way to despair when I found them: the perfect pair of rhinestone and fake pearl earrings.

I was brushing the dust off the rhinestones when I suddenly remembered opening a little velvet-lined gift box one Christmas morning, looking blankly down at those earrings, and thinking, I will never wear these.

And then I heard my mother saying, "You'll need them someday to wear to a party."

"Mo-om, I don't GO to parties," I replied, and at the time it was true. It still is, for the most part, at least for parties that require glitz.

"You will," she replied, with the kind of certainty only mothers possess.

My mother died of cancer in 1992. She probably gave me those earrings 10 years ago, and I tucked them away in my jewelry box and forgot about them.

Mom, who was perfectly comfortable in glitzy clothes and earrings and red lipstick, was always right. Sometimes it just takes her awhile.

Sometime this week I'll hear from my friend Mitchell, the first boy I ever had a crush on.

Mitchell, now a bald lawyer in Clayton, was pretty hot in fifth grade, and once I got over wanting to swoon whenever I saw him, we became good friends.

He and his family invited me to celebrate Hanukkah with them one year, and he still calls to tell me how many candles on the Menorah have been lit.

Every Christmas when I was growing up, my grandmother, who died in 1985, told us we were spoiled rotten and recounted how, during their worst year of the Depression, she and my grandfather couldn't even afford to give their children oranges.

Then she'd cut us another piece of cake and ask to see my new doll.

I check the mailbox most days now to find Christmas cards tucked in with the bills and the credit card applications, and I know the good wishes of family and friends are the best gifts I will ever receive.

I imagine it will be a long time before I get used to not seeing my mother on Christmas morning, and some days I have to remind myself my grandmother's gone.

Sometimes winter's cold brings a welcome numbness to memories of absent loved ones, and sometimes winter's quiet makes it easier to concentrate on those memories and almost re-capture a laugh or the particular quirk of a smile.

In the meantime, I will keep Christmas, and the friendly ghosts it raises, in my heart all year.

Happy hauntings.

~Peggy O'Farrell is a staff writer for the Southeast Missourian.