Christmas Memories

Fay has a wonderful new Christmas tradition -- she makes a Christmas pudding. Actually, she makes it a month or more before Christmas -- it has to age properly in a cool place. This year she made some for some dear friends of ours. I delivered theirs today. I went into their home, and I was shown their Christmas tree. I noticed that not only did they have the now old-fashioned Christmas tree lights )the ones with the bases about 1/2 inches across, but they had some of the "bubbling" lights on the tree as well. I had not seen them for years. I remembered the old 1/4 inch based lights, and the bubbling lights that they had. You might remember the 1/4 based lights: they were the ones that were in series -- if one burned out, the whole string would go dark.

My friend told me that they went out to a Christmas tree farm and cut down their tree. That took me back to 1968. My father was in Viet Nam. My oldest brother was at school in Ellensburg, Washington. My mother, my other brother, and I went out into the woods around DuPont, Washington and cut down our Chrsitmas tree for that year.



I remember that day. We took out an ax and a wheelbarrow and went out into the woods. We saw a deer. We came back and had hot chocolate. Forty-two years ago, and I childhood memory that I will always cherish.

Another memory I have is of my mother. She wanted to be an artist. In later years, she would do many paintings -- many of which hung in our home when I was in high school. In my younger years she would do a Christmas picture on our front window. This one is from 1961, at our home at 49 Xenia Street on Staten Island.



It wasn't so much that my mother got tired of doing these paintings in the window, rather it was that front windows stopped being big enough to do paintings in.

Memories of Christmas past. May there be as many good memories in the future.

Merry Christmas to you all.