Are the holidays a time of fun or stress for you and your family? Checkout the youtube answer for families that need a break.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y9-ctuBFAUg&NR
I have always enjoyed the holiday season. From the time I was a little boy I have longed for Thanksgiving Day and Christmas Eve/Christmas Day. Often we would travel back to WV for Thanksgiving and I remember hoping for snow to be on the ground so that I could go sledding down the big hill across from Grandma's house. Too often though it would not be cold enough and only rain would fall, but every year I still had hope.
Christmas Eve was next on my thoughts during the season. I dreaded the month of days that would follow Thanksgiving. Each day passed in slow procession. We did not have an advent calendar to help, and for me I am not sure it would have helped. Finally December 24th would arrive and of course the day would pass very slowly with the anticipation growing minute by minute. I don't know how my mom got through that day with all us kids (read me) getting on her nerves. Five o'clock would strike and mom had dinner ready on the table. We would enjoy a peaceful (yeah, right!) family meal together and then get in the car for the annual drive to look at all the Christmas lights. Dad was very good about taking his time and it drove me nuts. But, to be honest I really did enjoy the time in the car. Finally we would get home and open the wrapped gifts from one another. We had a tradition of everyone tearing into their gifts at the same time. No waiting around to see what each other got until after all the gifts we opened. That is my kind of Christmas Eve!
Evening passed and it was time for bed. Mom always made sure we had cookies, carrots and milk to set out for a Santa (surely he didn’t have enough to eat at all the other millions of homes he visited) and his reindeer who needed a little something to eat too! Then a sleepless night would follow. I thought it very good if I could hold out till 4:00 AM. It seemed like a reasonable time to me to get up because I had been awake the entire night! What came ever so slowly to me though for some reason came all too quickly for mom and dad. My role it seemed in the family was to annoy dad into letting us get up with questions like "can we get up now?" When I look back on it now dad anticipated Christmas morning as much as I did. Anyway, dad lingered in bed for a few minutes listening to my barrage of questions until he, and mom would get up and make their way down the hallway to the living room and light the Christmas tree. For some reason I was always pleasantly surprised that Santa considered me a good boy and each year would refill the Christmas tree area with toys. Mom and dad drank lots of coffee as we had a glorious morning together as a family.
I had the best family in the world growing up and I still do to this day! BTW: I still find it difficult to fall asleep on Christmas Eve.
What was your Christmas like when you were growing up?
Roger, over and out!
Wednesday, December 20, 2006
Merry Christmas!!!
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3 comments:
I think my parents originally had the idea to have all of the children sleep in one bedroom on Christmas Eve in order to exert some crowd control and keep us from sneaking a peak of our presents. This is completely understandable considering there were five of us! Whatever the reasons were in the beginning, it was a hit.
I can still remember lying on a pallet of blankets in my sister's room(as youngest, I never got the bed), and whispering long into the night about presents we longed to see under the tree the next morning. That is if you can call five o'clock morning! Of course all of us kids woke up around 4:30 to make sure we were ready to storm our parents room as soon as the clock blinked 5:00 and demand that Papa hurry up and light the fire and make his coffee so that we would be allowed to attack our stockings.
We had a hard time letting go of the Christmas Eve slumber party tradition. In fact we continued to pile in together even after some of us had married and had kids. But eventually as the family grew and it became harder and harder for us to all be together on Christmas, we've had to leave it behind to our childhood memories. I hope that one day my kids can experience the same kind of Christmas magic.
Wow, 5 Anna Carolines in one room on Christmas Eve. That must have been a sleepless night!!!
Christmas was usually a fun if stressful time around my house. We've had at least one interesting Christmas. The one that I will always remember happened in 1998. We had a freak heat wave in mid-December, and then all of a sudden it turned cold and we had a terrible ice storm on Christmas Eve. It knocked out power to our whole neighborhood. We ended up going over to my grandmother's house, since she had power, and stayed there until the power came back on the 26th. It was kind of hard to be merry while I was there; I mean, I wanted to go home, hang up my calendars, play on my computer, and watch my new Scooby-Doo on Zombie Island video, but I couldn't. Still, that taught me a lesson about what Christmas is really about, which is not "gimme, gimme, gimme."
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