I was admiring a friend’s elaborate dining room table Christmas centerpiece — this one purchased or gifted, most assuredly not handmade — when I had a flashback to childhood.

I tend to have a few of these whenever another holiday season rolls around, plus I tend to be a comparison-type person anyway. I see something you have or something you’ve made, and I think to myself, well, that’s not my experience.

I’m not sure how I was put in charge — probably by default — but I was commissioned for several years of my youth to make the table centerpieces at Christmas despite an unimpressive resume and lack of references.

My mother, God bless her, wasn’t much for crafts, and was happy for someone else, anyone else, to take up the cause come Christmas. Besides, she surely had other worries, other priorities, than what was in the middle of the table intended to make everything look all festive and decorative.

Making homemade mashed potatoes for a crowd was among her chief concerns on Christmas Day, a labored undertaking that involved peeling, boiling, hand-mashing, lump eradication and prayers that there would be enough potatoes and, Lord help us, let them stay warm until they hit the plates.

And then there was Act II, the whole gravy production.

Among an assortment of holiday Polaroid photos is one of mom potato-toiling at the stove, a process interrupted only by a brief side glance toward the camera to accommodate whoever the intrusive Christmas Day photographer was in this particular case. True to tradition, she was wearing an apron over her holiday outfit along with an expression that left to my interpretation translated, “Don’t bother me — I’m in the spud-whipping zone.” Or something like that.

Every time I make instant mashed potatoes, I swear I think of my mother and reaffirm it’s OK that my personal potato path is to go the easy route, to take the low road.

Where I came up with the idea for these Christmas centerpieces I don’t know, but I used cut poster board and made cones that were supposed to resemble pine trees. Some of them had a wobbly base since I didn’t cut too straight. The “trees” got covered with cotton balls I glued to them and then, to that, I glued little chocolate balls wrapped in red, green, gold and silver foil. They were meant to look like tree ornaments. Ingenious, right?

They held their own until people started to pick at them in response to I-need-chocolate cravings, which I totally can understand and appreciate so these centerpieces had a brief table life, depending on how many sweet tooths were raging.

Eventually I retired from making these — or got fired, which can happen to volunteers.

But having holiday centerpieces is a tradition that’s endured in one way or another.

Better Half had to adjust to that reality as we blended night-and-day interpretations of what constitutes a centerpiece. I say it’s something festive and decorative, true to my childhood upbringing. He leans a little more toward the practical — salt and pepper shakers or, duhhh, food.

Or just nothing, which makes things much simpler, especially if you’re playing a game of cards after a meal. Everything is ready, set, go, win.

There was an especially unique centerpiece of sorts when I was growing up, only this one was on the refrigerator door, testimony to my sister Linda’s creativity.

She used scissors and a mosaic-colored piece of contact paper to create the most beautiful nativity scene.

It was all from scratch, no pattern, just her eagle eyes and imagination winging it.

I think that decoration outlived the refrigerator, but not the message behind it, that Jesus Christ is life’s greatest centerpiece.

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