Saturday Night Genealogy Fun - Tell Us Your Best Christmas Memory

Calling all Genea-Musings Fans: 

 It's Saturday Night again - 

time for some more Genealogy Fun!!

Here is your assignment, should you decide to accept it (you ARE reading this, so I assume that you really want to play along - cue the Mission Impossible music!):

1)  Many of us brew up believing in Santa Claus as children, having a Christmas tree, going to church, and visiting relatives and friends at Christmas time.

2)  Tell us your "best" Christmas memory - what Christmas holiday event is still vivid and real in your mind?

3)  Share it in a blog post of your own, in a Facebook post.  Please leave a comment here so we can all read about your memory

Here's mine:

As a child growing up in the 1950s, my family would go to my maternal grandparent's house on Point Loma overlooking San Diego Bay on Christmas Eve and stay overnight and celebrate Christmas there with gifts and an early dinner.  They had a chimney and fireplace (and we did not in our apartment).  Plus, it was convenient for my parents to stash the gifts from Santa away from prying boy eyes before Christmas.

My brother Stan and I were wondering about the reality of Santa Claus when I was 12 (and he was 9) in 1955 because we heard our friends talking about it.  How could we find out for certain?  After we arrived on Christmas Eve, we were shooed outside to go play on the hillside in front of the house.  We did, but we managed to sneak into the garage through the side door very quietly, and looked through the "storage" side of the two-car garage.  We were used to wiggling through tight places.  There, up against the garage door, were two new bicycles, covered with a sheet or blanket.  Aha!  If those show up as "from Santa," we have our proof!  

Of course, they showed up by the fireplace "from Santa Claus" but we hooted and hollered but we kept our mouths shut about our discovery, and enjoyed our new bicycles for many years.

A second very vivid memory:  My parents were not religious, and my grandfather was not religious, but my blessed grandmother was religious.  Stan and I had learned the first verses of many Christmas carols over the years at school, and we heard them on the radio.  On Christmas Eve, Gram would take us into our bedroom (at her house), make us lie down in our pajamas and told us to close our eyes, shut the door, turned the lights out, and we would sing Christmas carols until we went to sleep.  My eyes tear up when I think about this.  It was really the start of my Christian journey.  My Gram was really special.

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