Ani's Twelve Tasks | The Ninth: The Happy New Year | Child Self

The Twelve Tasks of the Festive Season

The Task:  If you're feeling brave, post a holiday picture of yourself from your childhood or misspent youth.

To be honest, I like posting my own pictures as much as I like my picture being taken... which is not at all.  There are probably more pictures of me during my childhood than at present, because the camera and I don't really get along unless I'm behind it these days.  And also, any holiday pictures I have post-childhood years just don't stand up to the ones of myself when I was two or three years old.

So I don't mind sharing pictures of myself as a kid--I'm hardly recognizable anyway.  Adult pictures are a different story altogether.

Anyway...

This particular picture was taken at my uncle's house during a family Christmas get-together, and there is actually another one that's extra cute with me and my older brother--him all decked out in his little man's suit.  Since Asian people love taking purposefully posed pictures, there are few that are more natural--everything has to be perfectly set-up.  So when I was told to pose, I did what I thought was an elegant curtsy... which I realized several years later was just me lifting my skirt way too high.

Of course, no one in my family bothered to point out why they thought it was funny.  Obviously a few inches higher and I'd be flashing my panties at everyone.  -_-

As the only girl in my household, during my youth I was usually my mother's dress-up doll, so she loved to put me in different dresses and hairpins, and paint my face a with a little too much make-up.  But really, that was the extent of my feminine days, so I hope that Mom enjoyed it while it lasted.  It didn't take long for me to throw off the dresses and crawl into a pair of my brother's hand-me-down shorts and t-shirts.

Here's another rare photo of me in a dress, also during the holidays.  There really aren't very many of them.  And if you notice, I'm wearing the same shoes and socks, as well as little jade necklace that now sits at the base of my throat rather than in the middle of my chest--that thing has been with me my entire life.

We never really celebrate Christmas in any traditional way since it's not a traditional Asian holiday.  But in following with the whole "When in Rome..." concept (or rather, "When in America..."), my family and relatives will still decorate and be festive with lots of food and lots of drinks (because Asian people love their food and drink).  Instead of Christmas gifts, however, my parents always gave me and my brothers lucky red money envelopes which were promptly taken away and placed in a college fund in the bank.

I'm almost certain that the second picture taken above is during the Chinese New Year, which usually lands a little after the Christmas and universal New Year holidays.  This was most certainly at a Chinese restaurant owned by a family friend who decided to keep his Christmas decorations up for a while longer.  Christmas decorations are really a favorite of a lot of Chinese people I know because of all the big bold colors, the sparklies, and the dominance of the color red.  So the decorations will sometimes double for the Chinese New Year as well, if we can pull it off.