I remember Troy and I waking up at about 3 or 4 a.m. and that the living room looked completely magically. [Eventually, Traci wouldn’t go down and check out things with us. She preferred to sleep, and she wakes up like a bear.] My mom always loved to try to make our home look as much like Better Homes & Gardens as she could, so for Christmas, the living room was perfect.
Our house is really old, and has a stone fireplace by which we hung our stocking with care. So, we would sneak into the living room, and the fake logs would be glowing along with the glow of the tree lights and there were presents all separated into three stacks. We would wake up my sister and make her look with us, and then we would go wake up my parents and say, “Guess what Santa brought us?!” And they would be groggy and say, “…great…okay…let’s go back to bed…”
Let’s just focus on the fact that I still remember repeating this every year until probably about age 12—maybe later, at which point my brother would have been almost 19. My first memory of finding presents was the year I got a baby grand (well, it was sized for a 4 year old), and then there was the great year I got my Fisher Price Doll house.
That Santa, he’s a gem!
Memories of Note:
The year we got a VCR, my brother said, “There really is a Santa Claus!” (It was probably 1985.)
The year that we had to have our septic tank cleaned out on Christmas Day, my brother kept saying that Santa Flush came to town.
I remembered that when I was probably around 9 or 10, I started pricing my list. I would comb through the catalog, pick out all my toys, and list all the prices. Our parents had given us an approximate amount of spending for each child. My dad was an accountant.
Immediately after opening all the presents, we would call my cousins and compare loot.
I still have heartache over the Christmas that I lost my Barbie’s shoes. I think they got thrown away in the wrapping paper clean up. Why did they make those shoes so easy to lose anyway? They should come with a back-up.
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