Most memorable holiday moments...

[michchick98]

Okay, with Thanksgiving knockin', I thought it'd be cool to share memorable holiday moments. It's always fun to 'hear' about what people remember most about their past holidays, be it Thanksgiving, Christmas or whatever.

I have so many wonderful memories of Christmases past, but my favorite was from when I was about seven years old.

My mom and dad had recently divorced and my mom was struggling to raise my brother and I on her own. She always had help from our neighbors who lived across the street. They would take us places with their kids just to give mom some quiet time.

The first Christmas without my dad was hard on my brother and I and we knew mom couldn't afford much. My uncle came over on Christmas Eve and took us to midnight mass and during mass, pointed out the window at a plane flying over head (we didn't know it was a plane) and said it was Santa. Neither my brother nor I wanted to believe him, we just knew Santa wasn't going to visit us that year.

When we got home from mass, mom told us to go get ready for bed cuz Santa will be here soon. We had to walk through the living room to get to our rooms and when we did, we stopped dead in our tracks just staring at what was under the tree.

It was a brand new sled!! One of those cool wooden ones with the metal runners. Similar to the one in the attached picture. It had a big red bow on it and the tag on it said, "To: Mel and Sheri" "From: Santa"

Yes, we once again believed in Santa Claus.

My mom said our neighbors who always helped her out with us had the sled in the storage room in their basement and brought it over while we were at church. They covered their tracks in the snow so that we wouldn't know someone had been there.

Yeah, we got a few other gifts that year, but the only thing I remember is that sled.

To this day, my mom still buys gifts for my brother and I. I've told her in the past that Christmas is more for the kids than the adults and she said as long as she can continue to do it, she will buy gifts for us at Christmas.

What an awesome woman my mom is! I love her so much! My stepdad has been great over the years, too. And of course, my dad! Even when my dad was on a very limited budget, he always managed to get something for my brother and I for Christmas, even in our adult years.

So, what about you? Do you have any memorable holiday moments? I have a Thanksgiving one that I'll share later, right now it's time for me to call it a night.

 

[Lady_Guenivere]

I gave birth to my daughter in 1995, just a few days short of Christmas. My favorite holiday memory was during that time. It was New Years Eve and I was curled up in my bed with my new daughter in my arms. My husband was in our living room entertaining a few close friends, giving me time to rest.

I was quietly nursing her as the year changed...just she and I looking at one another in silence...learning to love and trust each other. It was one of the most profound moments of my life.

Hard to believe my little angel is turning 13 this year.

 

[sr71plt]

My most memorable Christmas morning moment was being awakened at my son/daughter-in-law's house early Christmas morning to a ringing telephone, followed by my daughter-in-law stumbling down the staircase to the first level of their house screaming that she had to see "her before she was gone." She'd given birth prematurely (insisting on natural childbirth to the end) the previous afternoon to a girl with an underdeveloped heart, who went straight to intensive care with somewhat less than a 50 percent chance of making it. By the time my wife and I got out of the bed, she and my son were gone, leaving us to assume the baby was dying--and with our other granddaughter asleep in her room.

All through Christmas morning, my wife and I were left with entertaining a two-year-old through a Christmas morning, trying to keep her from wondering too much where mom and dad were, and frantically calling hospitals in the area to try to figure out where the newborn (and our son/daughter-in-law) were. (The "before she is gone" bit turned out to be before the baby was transferred to a better-equipped hospital.)

No one thought to call and tell us anything and it moved into Christmas afternoon (although the daughter-in-law did get her own parents notified and brought in from a three-hour-drive away. We have that sort of daughter-in-law). By midafternoon, we'd found out (on our own) what hospital the baby had been sent to (having to overcome a pile of "we can't give out that sort of information over the phone" and finally resorting to having my doctor brother-in-law call from Virginia and wheedle the information out of Pennsylvannia doctor friends), and I sent my wife, who, of course, had turned into a basket case, off to that hospital and continued entertaining my other granddaughter while putting together a Christmas dinner for whoever showed up that evening. They all, including the other grandparents and the daughter-in-law's sister, eventually showed up, ate the dinner, and said nothing (to this day) about never calling us to let us know what was happening. (And didn't even say anything about a Christmas dinner miraculously being on the way to the table when they got home.) Grandparenting and "life with daughter-in-laws" has its moments.

That granddaughter is 7 now. Still with a heart problem, but you wouldn't know it by the way she bounces around.

Before that, my most memorable Christmas was our first one in Bangkok--where, first of all, we had to do with a small aluminum tree because the one we had ordered from Sears was sent to Bangor, Maine (and Sears had no answer when we asked them who in the hell in Bangor, Maine, would need to have a fake Christmas tree sent to them). This was followed by discovering at 2 am Christmas morning (after returning snockered from the obligatory Thai Foreign Ministry Christmas reception) that fire ants had gotten into the not-yet-assembled toys we'd collected for the children and had eaten everything paperish, including all of the assembly directions and the decals off the plastic kitchen appliances and the Guns of Navarone set. Assembly (amid quite a bit of cursing) got completed about 10 minutes before the children appeared and tore it all apart again, apparently not noticing either that it now looked like it came from a Goodwill store or that some parts were attached to the wrong toy.

 

[carrie-on]

I had lots of memorable Christmases when I was a kid, but probably the most memorable was in the late 80's when my daughters were kids.. My daughters, for a few yrs before had always sneaked in to see what was under the tree after Hubby and I were asleep. One year, Hubby and I fixed them. LOL After we got everything under the tree, we rigged fishing line past it, to the slider knob on the stereo(which we always left on playing Christmas music.),then across the door of the living room. We had been in bed about half an hour, when all of a sudden the stereo blasted out "Santa Claus is Coming to town", which made it even funnier. We heard the girls running for their beds and Crash, when they jumped back into bed,the mattress fell through and hit the floor! My girls, every Christmas, talk about that night and how they were sure that there wouldn't be anything under the tree because Santa Claus knew what they had done.

 

[carrie-on]

Another memorable holiday was about 13 or 14 years ago, when my girls were teenagers and I was in college and also working full time. It was Thanksgiving and I had worked the night shift the night before, getting home about 7:30 am. I left a note on the table, asking them to wake me up around 10 so I could get the turkey ready to put in the oven. When I woke up, it was 4:30 in the afternoon and I panicked,jumped out of bed and flew to the kitchen where the girls and Hubby were putting the food on the table, all done. They had decided to cook it themselves,letting me sleep. It was great! While we were eating, they were telling me about how they had come in and asked me (while I was sleeping) how long to put the turkey in the oven. Apparently I told them to look on page 367 at the table in my textbook. They said they wasted half and hour looking through all my textbooks and couldn't find anything about how to cook a turkey on pg 367, in any of them. They finally gave up and called my Mom, who talked them through it. Every Thanksgiving, this story gets brought up by one of the 3 of the girls!

 

[michchick98]

Wow, some good moments so far. I do have one for Thanksgiving, well, it's memorable for me, but probably embarrassing for my mom.

My cousin, Laura, and her husband (then he was just her boyfriend - early 80's) showed up for Thanksgiving dinner, instead of going to my uncle's house because my mom wanted to meet Ken (my cousin's boyfriend). So she invited them to Thanksgiving.

My mom had never in her life made a pumpkin pie but wanted to try her hand at one. My grandma told her to basically follow the directions on the can of pumpkin pie mix and it would pretty much make itself. So she did.

She mixed the ingredients called for and cooked it for the required amount of time. When she pulled the pie out of the oven, it was still 'soupy' in the middle. She asked my grandma (who was also there for dinner) what to do and gram said to cook it for a bit longer...."sometimes that happens."

So mom put the pie in for another ten or fifteen minutes. She pulled it out and the crust was a dark brown but the center of the pie was still 'soupy.' She didn't check the outer edges of the pie, figuring since the crust was so dark, it was only the center that wasn't done.

We ate dinner while the pie cooled and mom happily scooped out vanilla ice cream and pumpkin pie to everyone for desert. She was horrified when she cut the first piece of pie and lifted it from the pan.....all that remained on the serving wedge thingy she used was the crust of the pie, the rest had remained in the pie pan.

It was cooked, but for whatever reason, it didn't 'solidify' as it should have so instead of vanilla ice cream and pumpkin pie, we had pumpkin 'soup.'

Mom wanted to make a good impression on my cousin's boyfriend and she was devastated because of the way the pie turned out. Ken ate every last bit of the pie and ice cream and told my mom it was the best meal he'd ever eaten.

Fast forward about ten years, I was living in my own apartment and mom had asked what my plans were for Thanksgiving. I told her I was coming to her house and she told me to bring desert.

I decided to try my own hand at making a pumpkin pie. I followed the directions on the can, just like mom did and thought back to that day. I knew if it came out the same way hers did, I'd just hit the local grocery store and buy a pie.

Anyway, when I pulled my pie out of the oven, it was perfect. I brought the pie with me to mom's, told her I made it myself and nearly got thrown out of the house.

To this day, she won't allow ANY pumpkin pie (homemade or store bought) at her table on Thanksgiving. It's actually a family rule now. Anyone who shows up with a pumpkin pie is told to leave it outside or not come in at all.

She's never tried again to make another pumpkin pie.