My Fascinating Childhood

I had a very fascinating childhood, even though I usually spent my time by myself. Beginning with the creating little houses and dollhouse furniture with paper, I soon moved on to sewing doll clothes, embroidering and even water coloring after first trying working with wax crayons.
I had an eight inch little doll, since we still didn't have Barbie yet. I made tiny shorts, blouses and everything I saw in the magazines, such as Saturday Evening Post. I still remember a magazine article showing the wardrobe of one of my favorite movie stars, and of course i tried to copy it for my little doll. I even made shoes for her in little tiny details, including shoelaces.

My First Christmas Tree

I still remember my very first Christmas tree. It was way back in 1952, when I was eight years old living in Kenedy, Texas. I took a branch from a normal garden tree, not a fir tree at all, and planted it into some dirt I put in a cardboard box. This little tree, about two feet high, was decorated with paper decorations made by me and colored by me, without any adult help at all. I drew some birds, copying them from a coloring book, but I didn't trace them. I colored them and cut them out, but since they were drawn on regular paper, they didn't hold a very stiff form at all,but I was happy with them. I colored and folded paper fans and added my gum wrapper chains and I was happy. I later kept adding candy wrapper little things if the wrappers were shiny.
I made the whole box into a little villege by making folded paper houses and even a small bird house, with paper.
The following year, in Weslaco, my dad bought me a two foot fir tree at the grocery store and I made paper decorations for that one, using a book on paper folding to add more things. That tree had a sting of lights with eight little lights(about an inch long different colored lights).
Since then, I had a real fir tree evey year, usually two or three foot tall a nd I usually arranged it on a table by the window in the living room of my mother's house.
The first year, that I didn't have my own tree was the year I got married-1970! At Christmas i was living with my sister-in-law in Weslaco and she had a silver artificial tree.
The following year with a sall child, I bought a small three foot artificial, but green and very real looking tree. I used my old Christmas ornaments, some store bought ones I had added throughout the years. I kept using the same artificial tree for many years.
In 1992, my daughter bought me a 5 foot one, artificial and green too. It looked very real. this was not replaced until 2008 by a newer one.
This year(2009), I decided to finally go back to a real one, not having had a REAL one since 1969! This was the first year I didn't have cats or kids in the house! I loved the smell of fir --it seemed to fill the whole house with a real Christmas smell!
It was a wonderful experience, but it dried too much by the time I took it off, because I usually keep my tree until the 6th of January, the Day of the Three Kings.

Weslaco's Birthday Parade

In the fifties, Weslaco used to have big yearly birthday celebrations, complete with huge parades comparable with the Rose Parade. Organizations would work almost the whole year on plans for a special float that would compete with all the floats in the parade. These participating floats were not only from local organizations but even from some outside the Rio Grande Valley itself.
Just like in the Rose parade this floats had moving parts and were usually constructed with millions of flowers. I remember the St. Joan of Arc PTA working on one in the year 1959, when I was in the eight grade in that parochial school. We all helped to put it all together, using crepe paper flowers and real flowers to cover the whole framework. There was a big arch and beneath the arch was a young man with a guitar, depicting Elvis Presley.
Seeing the whole parade was really amazing and I remember sometimes it would take hours to pass in front of our main street with about forty floats, more than twelve bands, both local and from other areas, cars, firetrucks and other vehicles, including some antique cars. People sometimes assembled hours before the parade in order to get good vantage points on the main route. It was an unforgettable memory each year!

Cascarones

When I was a child of about eight or ten I used to make "cascarones" to sell to public school kidsat Easter time, who passed by our house everyday."Cascarones" are decorated Easter eggs made from empty egg shell that have been washed and dried and then filled with paper confetti and sometimes flour. They can just be colored but I chose to make them into faces with different costumes--old women, clowns, little girls or boys and even animals such as rabbits.

Idolina Gracia-daughter of Josefa Gracia

I have a very clear memory of the day my cousin Idolina Gracia was born. (I now know this happened on December 14, 1947)
My aunt Fita was living in a small rented house in the backyard of a woman named Dona Angelita, half a block away from a corner store about five blocks down the street from my mother's and my home on Iowa street. My mom and I were at my Aunt's house and so was my Uncle Nazario when Dr. Glass came to deliver my cousin. Uncle Nazario, being a man and me , being three years old , were thrown out of the small house to fend for ourselves. I remember clearly my Uncle placing me atop the fence post in the yard and holding ,me there as we watched some cats playing across the street and watching the cars pass while we waited for my cousin to be born. The fence post was a railroad tie anout 8 inches in diameter and ample room for me to sit atop of it and heavy chicken wire with 2 inch squares was nailed to the huge posts as a fence.
I remember later when we went back in to see my newborn cousin wrapped in blankets and was told her name was Idolina!

Two Families

Be cause of my mother being the 11th child of my grandfather, Miguel Lopez, she was the link joining the two families. The older kids had been full grown and out of the house when my grandfather was widowed, so they were not as closely acquainted with the children born to the second wife as the younger children were, such as my mother and my Aunt Josefa, who was the 12th child.
As I was growing up, I noticed that the older members of the family visited my mother often, as did the members of the second family. My mother and my aunt were the link tying the two families together for many years.

Abuelita Maria

In 1952, my father had an old Model T car, which he had fixed to have room for carrying his carpenter tools. he removed the trunk closing and added a wooden area he made to look like a pick up truck. My father, Jose Villarreal was a freelance carpenter, who could give you an accurate detailed list of the lumber needed to make whatever size building anyone wanted, mostly little houses used for homes by hispanic people in Weslaco. He could figured out exactly how many 2x4's. etc for whatever addition or construction was wanted. Usually my mother was the one who putted it down on paper, because he didn't know how to read or write, but he did know exactly how many pieces of each piece of lumber he needed. I could never figure out how he knew that, but he did.
As soon as I learned to write, it became my task to put down on paper his summary of lumber needed for all his work projects.
In 1952, because there had been very few jobs, my parents decided to go try to find work in Kenedy, where my mother's oldest sister, Maria, lived with her husband and two married children. Her husbands name was Nicolas Aguirre, and he was in charge of a farm and he had three houses for himself and his two married children, Ernesto, married to Catarina, and Aurora, married to Ortiz. Ernesto had five daughters, Olivia, Ofilia, Ofelia, Odilia, and the youngest Orselia, just a toddler then. Aurora had only two girls, Adelaida and Ana. Adelaida must have been in her early teens and Ana about 5 years old.
When we arrived in Kenedy, we stayed at the farm with Maria, who I always called "abuelita", or grandmother. It was a learning experience for me to be living in a farm. I saw my Abuelita and Catarina making corn dough for "tortillas" and "gorditas" They used two old methods---"el metate", which was an old stone utensil that looked like a slide, with a stone that looked like rolling pin, but was a square shape for grinding the corn into dough. They also had another kind of grinder, very similar to a coffee grinder.
My Abuelita was an expert in needlework. She made all the clothes everyone used, and always decorated all the children clothes with crocheted edges. She even used crocheted edges to decorate and finish the edges of panties, slips, nightgowns and even bed linens. All the women oin the household were expert quiltmakers and they had beautiful quilts, both pieced and appliqued. She even made her own towels and potholders, both crocheted and quilted.
Besides all the sewing and other needlework, my abuelita was an avid reader. She was the one who named me Odilia after the magic swan in Swanlake, the ballet. Having left school very young, she had made it a point to educate herself on her own.