7 Favorite Christmas Memories

Okay I don’t know how to continue that revised poem anymore, so I’m gonna stop, LOL. I was just really gonna say that it’s the Sunday before Christmas and somehow, that happened. 😛

Anyway, for today’s Sunday Seven I have something special – 7 favorite Christmas memories by 7 bloggers, including me!!

These bloggers had all signed up to do a Christmas card exchange with me, so I asked them if they also wanted to participate in a doing a blog Christmas feature and happily said yes, so tada!!!! Here are their answers.

(1) I have a lot of good memories pertaining to Christmas. Especially those of when I were a child.

In the run up to Christmas Day my Great-Grandmother would have us do so much manual labour in aid of revamping the entire house for Christmas Day.

As a child this was not a good experience (lazy child). However now that am away from home and my Great Grandmother is no longer here, I would give anything to be bossed around into painting the verandah, polishing the floors etc.

As on Christmas morning it was all worth it. It was somewhat dreamy, all the different colours and smells of Christmas that we woke up to!

(2) That’s an easy one! In my opinion “free time” is a big luxury in our society, so when my whole family managed to have a week off during the big holidays all at the same time – it felt simply amazing. We had the opportunity to spend real quality moments together, by baking a lot of cookies and “browsing thorugh” the old photo albums, sharing stories and hiding from each other in different rooms to “secretly” wrap gifts. It was a great year!

(3) My Dad used to be the dean of a college, so we always got the Christmas tree from the institute. We usually had to wait until the last day of teaching and then we were allowed to take the tree. We would go in after hours (spooky!), undress the tree and carry it down from the third floor and about a 10 mins walk to our house. It was so magical to be carrying this amazing big tree around town, it was very quiet in the snow, no cars, people would say hello and give us big smiles knowing what we were up to.

(4) The first year I moved to Canada, I was worried about Christmas. So, The Canadian, my then boyfriend, set about recreating a Christmassy-Christmas for me. He bought all the British foods and even located a duck. It was so romantic and his actions showed me that I’d made the right choice moving.

(5) I think, being an expat now, my favorite memories were just being able to spend time with my family. I always thought how uneventful my family gatherings were since we have a small family, but over the years I’ve come to realize that that is what makes us our special family. We have our own ways of getting together and we need to cherish every moment.

(6) My favourite Christmas memory is that one year we had gone to visit my grandparents a few days before Christmas but were returning back to our home the morning of Christmas eve. We lived in the mountains in New Mexico and it snowed so much that we couldn’t get through the road to our house. (I’m talking snowdrifts taller than I am!) So we just ditched the car along a very rural road about 2 miles from my house and hiked through the snow to get home. It really felt like we had earned Christmas that year and the house had never seemed so warm before!

(7) I have a lot of favorite Christmas memories, but one from recent memory is one I like to call:

 

Back in my company in the Philippines, it was the practice to give presents to everyone in our department of around 40 people.

My friends and I had the idea of leaving our gifts with an anonymous note “from your secret santa” and not giving them all in one go. On the nights leading to Christmas, we would stay back and leave a few on people’s tables per night.

Our gifts were stuffed toys we picked to match each person accompanied by a personalized poem we wrote to explain the significance of the chosen toy. (And by “we” wrote I actually mean “I” wrote. I have a thing for rhymes.)

I enjoyed this so much because it was kind of a prank (which I love to pull) but a positive one. It generated quite a buzz that in the next few nights it became a bit of a challenge to pull off our heists leave our gifts without getting caught.

People thought it was just one person, which we purposely did that way, but in the end they did eventually guess the truth, which we laughingly admitted to.

Care to share a favorite Christmas memory?