Christmas Past

A few random Christmas memories from my childhood:

- My sister and I would sleep in each other's room every Christmas Eve.  One year she would sleep in my room, the next year I would sleep in hers.  We would talk and giggle into the wee hours of the morning.

- There were only a couple of  years during my childhood that we didn't drive to Urie, Wyoming to see my great-grandma and cut our own Christmas Tree.  One year we even had our picture taken for the local newspaper.

- I would search the house high and low, looking for where my parents had hidden the Christmas presents.

- For Christmas when I was 11, my parents gave me a new daybed.  I was mortified to see the pamphlets from my sixth grade "maturation program," that I had hidden safely under the mattress of my old bed, stacked neatly on my bedroom floor.  My dad had seen them!

- When I was 12, Marci and I pretended to be sick so that we could stay home from church.  While everybody else was gone we snuck under the Christmas Tree and carefully opened all of the presents that my aunt had sent from California.  Then we taped them back up before anybody got home.

- The night before Christmas we would all take our beautiful handmade stockings in our anxious hands and stake out our "spots."  Draping your stocking over the back of a chair told Santa to put any gifts he brought for you on that chair.  Of course the biggest spots were the most desirable real estate.

- Hanging on the "kid Christmas tree" were stalwart soldiers and beautiful ballerinas made from wooden clothes pins.

- Christmas morning we would line up youngest to oldest and walk into the family room in a line to find our Christmas presents.

- Lying on my back under the Christmas tree and looking up through the branches at all of the twinkling  lights felt like magic (it still does).