The Moth Radio Hour: Menorahs, Presents and Palm Trees - December Holiday Stories
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This is the Moth Radio Hour from PRX. I'm Sarah Austin-Ginesse. This is our annual December holiday episode. We have stories of feasts, traditions, celebrating, not celebrating, connecting with family and friends, and just wanting to be alone. Six stories that explore the mixed emotions that come with this last month in the year. Our first storyteller is moth veteran Peter Aguero. Peter calls this story Me and Mama versus Christmas. Lots of people go overboard at Christmas. It's a time of excess. The decorations and the gifts and the food. But what if money is tight? Peter told this story at a moth night we produced in partnership with West Virginia Public Radio. Here's Peter Aguero.
So I just finished my first semester of college and I have a big bag of laundry and I come through the door of the house and things aren't looking too good for me and my mom. The first thing I notice is that the piano's gone. She had that ever since she was a little girl and took piano lessons. We always put the nativity on top of it around Christmas time. I took piano lessons for two weeks, but I still took piano lessons on that piano and that's gone. I go through the living room and the only thing that's left is just one couch that's with broken springs sticking out of it. There are two televisions, one on top of the other. One has picture that works and one has sound that works. Over in the corner are the impressions still from my dad's lazy boy that has been gone for four years now. And that's the only furniture in the room. I go upstairs. The dining room's empty. There used to be this big, beautiful dining room set with carved chairs and a glass break front and a buffet table. And that's gone. In the kitchen, there's the kitchen set. There's two chairs.
There used to be four, but I broke one of them. And the other chair, I also broke. And... There's only two left. And I go upstairs to the bedrooms, and in my mom's room, there's nothing left but her mattress on the floor. And there's nothing quite as damning as a bedroom without furniture, because you see all the dings and the scratches in the wallpaper, like all the mistakes that can usually be covered up, but you see them all now. My sister's room is exactly the way it looked when she moved out to go live with my dad. It's Pepto-Bismol pink walls and a canopy bed and this big toy box in the shape of a rubber strawberry, as if she was going to move back in and be the little girl that she was. uh, before she moved out. My room, uh, looks exactly the way it was when I left. There's just posters all over the walls and, and, uh, it's, it's ridiculous like, like me.
So I, I start to do my laundry and my mom comes home from work and she immediately takes over. It doesn't let me do it myself. And I ended up helping her with it. And she's happy to see me. She's happy that I'm home. Uh, when we're done that, we go up to have dinner and my mom makes, uh, tomato casserole was one of my favorite things.
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