Christmas Memories - The Day

I am on vacation. I am spending Christmas wih my family and with my wife's family. This is how we spend Christmas. A few days and up through Christmas Eve with my family, and Christmas Day and a few days after with my wife's family, only 60 miles away from each other. We leave the confines of home and our little corner of the world to visit family and spend time in the areas we grew up and had our early Christmas's.

I have realized that as much as I love keeping up this blog, I do enjoy vacationing and am not much for using a laptop. I'm writing on one now, but I probably won't do another entry until next Tuesday. So - I pray that you all have a very Merry Christmas celebrating the birth of Christ, and that you have wonderful times of visiting with and enjoying your families!

Christmas Memories - The Snow

I am an old fashioned kind of guy. My ultimate Christmas dream would be that the whole family arrives for the days festivities and then the snow starts – or really starts to come down.

We have a huge stockpile of wood in the living room and the fire is roaring. There’s talking, laughing and maybe even singing at the piano. There’d be a lot of hot chocolate, cookies, great food and lots of treats.

There’d be a mandatory pick-up game of snow-football, or at least a huge snowball fight, with a time of warming up in front of the roaring fire with the whole family.

I guess that all I’m saying is that it doesn’t seem like Christmas without snow. Where I grew up there was a definite lack of snow. I probably remember only a half a dozen that had any measurable snow at all. The Seattle area is great for a lot of reasons, but having lots of snow is not one of those things. I now live in Eastern Washington and we have a lot of snow here… definitely more white Christmas’s than not – and we get some good cold single digit weather, too. Really makes it feel like Christmas! Here's some pics from my place last Christmas

So – as Christmas is fast approaching, do you get to have a white one? Or –did you have some great white Christmas’s growing up?

Christmas Memories - The Food!

Where would a discussion of Christmas be without bringing up the food?

There’s so. much. food. When I was young, we had a bunch of family… including Grandmothers, aunts, uncles cousins, etc… there was about 20 of us that gathered every year. We celebrated Christmas on Christmas Eve so my mom drew the line at dinner, and we would actually go out for dinner. Before you think that we were rich, I need to let you know that we would go to the Royal Fork – which was a family buffet restaurant. Everyone could eat whatever they wanted for the same low price. This was especially helpful when we started having a fair amount of teens in the mix.

So – we’d go out and pig out and then come home to a huge layout of Christmas treats. Tons of sweets, different salads, sausages, little dogs in bbq sauce, candy, rolls, pies, cookies, etc, etc, etc.

There are a few dishes that were always the standouts. My mom’s fudge is still – to date – the best fudge I’ve ever tasted, homemade or store bought. Smooth as silk, never grainy and so chocolatey! And – my mom’s shortbread was also the best I’ve ever tasted. There were so many incredible things there – and many of them we only got once a year – so we HAD to eat at least some of everything.

We’d spend the next few hours just snacking and snacking and snacking. As always, we started opening Christmas presents at midnight – that’s right – midnight. And each person opened their present’s one at a time. We wouldn’t finish until like 3am. We’ve changed this in the last few years so now we finish up by midnight.

But – we’d spend the next few days eating all the great leftovers What great Christmas food/treat tradition memories do you have?

Christmas Memories - The Decorations

We had plenty of decorations that went up all around the house, and we had fun putting them all up.

Since I grew up in a house full of kids – there were four of us – by nature, we were competitive. We had a beautiful Manger set and it had all of the classic pieces. Every year we would all want to be the one to find Baby Jesus.

All of the figurines were wrapped in tissue, and we had our own silly rules in “the search for Jesus”. You couldn’t just rifle through the box and try to grab the smallest one in hopes of finding it, you had to unwrap whichever one you pulled out and place in the crèche. There was no prize or special recognition for finding the Baby Jesus – just bragging rights that seldom lasted longer than the evening. But – YOU remembered! And every time you looked at the scene you knew that it was YOU who was responsible for Baby Jesus this year.

We had these extensive little village scenes. These weren’t fancy set-ups, but they still had a magical air about them. The snow was just sparkly, fluffy cotton, and the buildings we kind of small and didn’t light up or anything. The trees were a bit oversized and had steel wire trunks with pipe cleaner type material that were the branches. They did make a good cone shape with some big clumps of fake snow on them and little platforms so they stood up. The funniest thing was that mom picked up some plastic elk that were WAY oversized. This was always humorous to me, but we still put them up. My brother and I would secretly have little terror episodes of the attack of the mutant elks.

There were also lots of little individual decorations that we put up all over - all part of our own traditions. One other cool thing we did was that Mom always made her own door decoration. My brother and I always had to find downed branches for mom to use. They weren’t really fancy or anything, but they were always homemade and originals.

What memories do you have of your decorations?