Artsy Mom

My mom has always been creative. A long time ago -- back when "Saturday Night Live" was funny -- she'd decorate cakes to look like soccer fields, pyramids, women endowed with Hostess Sno-Balls.

You lost your innocence early in my home.

Mom works for the bank -- THE bank -- so her creative urges surface through cracks in the sidewalk. She mostly takes it out on the holidays.

At Christmas her tree is so burdened with ornaments that it leans to one side like Joe Cocker and children place the star on top without even stretching.

"Remember that star?" says Mom in her blinking Santa hat. "It's solid lead."

In the living room Mom keeps a perennial tree, decorated, beside the TV. My step-dad Mark, who comes from the south side of Chicago (motto: "Whadda YOU looking at?), lives with her condition full-time.

"I've lost all love for Christmas," he says.

This woman, Linda Baker, my dear mother, has Christmas flamingos, which all through December stand in her yard. The front yard. The one other people see.

On Thanksgiving we sit down to pumpkin-shaped name cards and a brick of homemade fudge. When Mom says it's from scratch, she means growing the flour, churning the butter, personally laying the eggs...

Thanksgiving dishes are laid on chargers -- plates that hold other plates. And why do we call them chargers when they don't go anywhere? Next to coasters designed not to slide? On strips of cloth that WE CALL RUNNERS.

The Super Bowl is a bonus holiday to fill the void between New Year's and Valentine's. Mom serves football-shaped cookies and provides foam bricks to throw at the referees.

During the game she walks in every ten minutes wearing her commemorative Super Bowl T-shirt to say, "What a buncha friggen bums." Then she storms out. The score doesn't matter; she's just cursing to be festive. So it goes.

Mom sends out greeting cards for every occasion, including Groundhog Day (which the bank probably takes off).

"A groundhog's not so scary, except once every February. Then his little shadow holds an early spring or lots more cold!"