2. Share a favorite holiday memory.

I was going to do the Christmas list but there’s honestly not much I either want or won’t get; my husband is pretty good at reading my mind. So then I decided I’d write about my most vivid memory from Christmas except… I already did!

Writer’s Workshop – A Christmas memory

So I guess I can come up with another one but it’s difficult. I have had 43 Christmases and all my memories sort of blend together into three categories: childhood, teenager/young adult, on my own/married/with kids.

As a kid, the memories look like this:

That’s me on the right and my baby sister along with our cousins. That’s our living room in the house I mentioned on Tuesday is now worth over 500k! I assume that wallpaper is long gone and so too, the ugly light blue carpet. We sometimes went to their house about 10 minutes from us but they usually came to ours. It’s funny: we always looked down on them for being messy and late to everything but they all turned out pretty good. (OK, except Adam who never got married and half the time, no one knows where he’s living but hey, there’s always one, right?)

(Please note that I still own one of those tables on the left hand side of this photo.)

In my teenage years, we moved to the Orlando area and I was 14 and everything was wonky. The one thing I held onto was that Christmas was a very warm time of year – temp wise and in our hearts. I remember thinking how well my mom knew what to buy me. I still got lots of presents like pens and journals and cool pillow cases and shirts. I only lived there for three years before heading off to college and then, I would come home to visit but soon after graduating college, I maybe didn’t go home as often.

That’s the living room where my parents always put the tree. In this house, we had SO much more room! I grew up in a 1700 sq/ft house that felt big when I was young but smaller as we got closer to moving. This one had 2100 sq/ft but felt huge!

In October 2005 I got married and we had purchased our own home the May before so we started making memories of holidays on our own. Those first two Christmases without kids, I am pretty sure we spent them without my parents. We stayed home one year and visited Ash’s family in Arizona the next.

As soon as we had children, every year was so very different: we had to be the ones organizing, buying, wrapping, playing the Santa game. It was fun, exciting, and stressful! But we have had wonderful Christmases ever since. Every year we either have my parents here or go there after our home Christmas. I have really enjoyed that they always spend a portion of the holiday with us and especially the children. Hoping they have fond memories of their grandparents going forward. I am dreading the time when all my children no longer believe (Elliot is obviously too old now, Isaac knows but won’t say anything, and Dakota is still firmly on board with the magic.) Below are some memorable photos over the years: