When it comes to Christmas I’m about as ‘Scroogie’ as they come. But I remember visiting the Pedris about five years ago just after New Year’s Day. It was time for my sister to take down the Christmas tree. I offered to help. But she told me she had to do the first part herself – of taking the ornaments off the tree. She told me I wouldn’t be careful enough with them. I was thinking of those fragile red and gold orbs. But they weren’t the issue. She was concerned about the trinkets that she had collected over the years: a plastic snowman, a couple of little wooden nutcracker soldiers, a ceramic angel, and so on. It was hard for me to understand how these trinkets could come to some harm by my touching them – or why they were so special. So I sat there, and watched her take them down one by one, carefully wrapping them in tissue paper and placing them in the proper box padded with more paper. And with each one she told a story, ‘this is the one Noni gave me when Matt was young. DeAnna made this one in first grade. These were given to us by Rosalie,’ and on and on and on. Now I’m not such a Scrooge that I can’t enjoy the beauty of a Christmas tree. But I had no idea the emotional investment, how personalized it could be, and to what degree a Christmas tree could serve as a monument to a lifetime of memories. My sister Annette – Netta as I called her – possessed womanly qualities that seem to be waning in an increasingly androgynous world. I still wonder how Netta the child became Annette the adult. This is something my four brothers and I, in our naivety of youth, spent little time thinking about. While we were playing sports and board games, building and destroying things, and beating each other up as boys do, she was alone in her pink, yellow, and white room, with her dolls and her little jewelry music box. She had to develop on her own, in a way, to face the many challenges life would throw at her. Considering that she came of age in the late Sixties and early Seventies, it is remarkable how uninterested she was in drugs, alcohol, night clubs, or traveling to far off places. Her life would be found through Christianity. She was into family, relationships, domestic responsibilities, and the sharing of ordinary pleasures. She never tired of telling me stories about her children - especially when they were small; how Matt, as a little tot, bragged to his teacher that his mom could make milk (powdered skim milk) – or how DeAnna once told her she wanted to visit China because so many of the labels on her toys said ‘Made in China’ – or how Hannah as a little babe once ask her ‘was I in you and then did I break-out?’ She loved early childhood development. She took it very seriously. She once told me that at the pre-school where she taught, she could tell immediately which children had stay-at-home moms. She may have enjoyed all of the many roles she played, as wife, as teacher, as daughter, as sister, as cousin, and as friend. But I believe being a mother to her three children is what she loved the most. Most people who knew Annette will remember her as a devoted wife and mother in her homes in Redding and Lincoln. But I’ll remember Netta as a child, in her St Ignatius uniform, with a red sweater, white shirt, and black and white plaid dress. I’ll remember her as an Arden Park Dolphin. I’ll remember the road trips we took, with a trailer we called ‘the Easter Egg’; those long nights in the back of a station wagon when the red lights of the radio towers were monsters coming to get us. I’ll remember the spring holidays we spent in Mendocino, collecting sea shells and driftwood on the beach, or discovering some enchanted part of the forest. I’ll remember how distressing a 1960 Studebaker was to her as a teen-ager and how, as an adult, pianos seemed to follow her around wherever she moved – though they were rarely played; how she hated horror movies and loved romantic comedies; how she doted over babies but never cared much for pets; how she occasionally had a weakness for kitschy art and how she always laughed at my corny puns. On the serious side, I’ll never forget the sound of her voice on the phone last September ten minutes after we both learned our eldest brother had died. It was one of many unpleasant crystal moments we shared. But most of all, I will remember how she was always there for me, her ‘Scroogie’ brother, even in my darkest hours. She was my big-hearted sister, forever concerned, always wanting to do something to make life just a little bit better. I was very, very lucky to have her.