Favourite holiday memory?

[DanieMarie]

What's yours?

I have a couple. One is various years of late Christmas (we always went after Boxing Day) at my Oma's place. My second is the time all my friends and I went caroling on Christmas Eve. We were in grade 12 and every house we went to was really thrilled. Even though together we weren't good singers, they thought it was great, because no one really goes caroling anymore. I'd LOVE to go again, but everyone I know is too embarrassed. It's hard to do in the city but I think it would be great to do it around Christmas markets with a charity box and donate the proceeds.

[Medusa]

Re: Favourite holiday memory?

When I was about 5 years old, my parents were divorced. I was living with my grandmother while my father was living somewhere else for a while. And my mother. Well my mother was living in a half way house after being released from the mental hospital. Every weekend my father would pick me up and take me to my mother's half way house. She would get a weekend pass. We would go to this small motel called Pinky's. It was like a Motel 6 but cheaper. Lol. And he would rent the 'suite', which had two bedrooms. I would have a bedroom all to myself and I would spend the night jumping up and down on the large bed. And of course my divorced parents...would do things married parents do (they later re-married each other and only divorced because my mom was in the mental hospital). We spent Christmas in that motel. My father purchased a small table top tree. And we stopped at this liquor store. I distinctly remember him buying me a pickle (because I love them!) and then we went back 'home' to the motel room. He apparently had purchased some gifts for me at the liquor store. I remember specifically a plastic pink mirror and brush set and I might have also gotten a doll. And we ate deli sandwiches.

It was the best Christmas I have ever had.

[Dez]

Re: Favourite holiday memory?

I've always really loved Christmas trees. When I was a little girl, ours had little dolls all over it my mother had gotten while traveling through Eastern Europe in college.

When I was about 10 years old, I noticed that while my grandparents had a tree, they never put it up. I insisted that I help them put up their tree, much to the anxiety of my grandmother. All of the things they had were old 40's and 50's ornaments--little wooden dolls, old school tinsel garland, hand-painted glass ornaments, those lights that were designed to look kind of like candles with little bubbles in them....

Every year between then and when she was moved into a home, I'd come about a week before Christmas and put up her tree, then take it down again after. She'd sit in her little chair and tell me all about Christmas on the farm in Mexico she grew up on. How her grandparents spoke German, and so she never got to really talk to them, and how they'd haul in a little tree on Christmas eve, and decorate it with popcorn and real candles, and how the big present in their stockings was real oranges.

I miss her so much, but in many ways, I'm watching our holiday season become much more like what she described growing up, and it makes me very happy.

[Amelia-Mary]

Re: Favourite holiday memory?

Mine is last year, my first Pagan Christmas (Yes, a contradiction) where I didn't have to hide anything and I could openly challenge the point of stuff, but didn't. Waking up at a normal hour, treating it like any other day, having a huge roast, and I got my BoS then as well. Just that whole day was amazing

[DustinHayden]

Re: Favourite holiday memory?

The time my mother and i planted pumpkins for that coming October. I was very young...4 or 5.

[-JT-]

Re: Favourite holiday memory?

When I was about 6, my family went hunting for real Christmas trees from one of those tree farms. I came across a tall, beautiful tree I fell in love with. (It was in the middle of a woods, so I don't even think it was supposed to be a part of the tree farm, but it happened to be perfectly shaped). My parents and aunt and uncle and all of the other relatives who came along all insisted it was too big to be a "proper" Christmas tree and ordered me to hurry on along. I refused and clung to the tree like the stubborn little kid I was. Well, they came back to get me, had a second look at the tree and decided it might fit in our living room after all (it had a vaulted ceiling). So to the marvel of all the employees and customers at the tree farm we chopped it down and marched off with the tallest, stateliest, most magnificent evergreen there. That tree, all decorated in our living room, is *the* definitive symbol of Christmas for me, and the story of how we got it is my favorite holiday memory. =)