Saturday Night Genealogy Fun: Holiday Celebrations and Memories - Part 2

  Calling all Genea-Musings Fans: 

 It's Saturday Night again - 

Time for some more Genealogy Fun!!

(Image courtesy of footnoteMaven ca 2008)

Join in and accept the mission and execute it with precision. Here's your chance to sit on Genea-Santa's lap (virtually) and tell him about your Christmases past.

Rev up the olde thynking cap and cue up the Mission Impossible music - your mission should you decide to accept it - keeping with the Christmas theme - is:

1)   Today's challenge is to share memories of December holiday gatherings and celebrations with your families (as a child, a young adult, a parent, a grandparent, a great-grandparent, an aunt or uncle, a nibling, a cousin, an in-law)!  

2)  Pick two or three questions from the list in my blog post:  Ask AI Gemini:  "What questions can I write about concerning family gatherings and celebrations during the December holidays?"  This is a new list of questions somewhat different from last year's list.

3)  Tell us about your memories of your holiday gatherings and celebrations in your own blog post, in a comment here, or on your Facebook page.  Be sure to leave a link to your report in a comment on this post.

Here's mine:

Question:  What is one holiday tradition that your family has lost or stopped doing over the generations, and why did it end?

Answer:  For over 30 years, one of the Seaver family traditions was to have a pea-throwing contest into our drink cups.  My father and his three sons, and eventually the wives and children of the three sons, took part.  My grandparents and my mother abstained and looked horrified every year.  We eventually modified it to take out the peas and throw our wadded up napkins into the drink cups or glasses.  It ended because my mother died in 2002, Scott moved away soon after, and our girls got married, and started having children so going to their homes for Christmas dinner took the load off of Linda (who always helped wherever we were) and we were able to see our daughters homes and our grandchildren. 

Question:  If you could travel back in time to observe one specific holiday gathering from your grandparents’ or great-grandparents’ era, which one would it be and why?

Answer:  Only one specific holiday?  I think I would pick Christmas 1926 in Leominster, Massachusetts.  My paternal grandparents probably had all six children present, plus the husband and baby daughter of my Aunt Evelyn.  The children included Marion (age 25), Evelyn (age 23), Ruth (age 19), my father Fred (age 15), Ed (age 13), and Gerry (age 9).  They might have had their uncle Harry and his wife Rose, and GrandAunt Nellie also.  I never met my paternal grandfather, Fred Sr., and only met my paternal grandmother Bess once, in 1959.  Seeing my father and his siblings interacting with each other, and my grandparents dealing with their brood might have been hilarious and educational.  My father at age 15 was probably about 5 foot 10 inches and 140 pounds and boisterous!

With this last one, I think that becomes the Christmas Day story for my AI assistant Claude to create.

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