Childhood Christmas

With all this sadness and devastation surrounding the shooting, I just wanted to blog about something happy. I cry every time I watch the news and it breaks my heart. I already had a hard time getting into the Christmas spirit with being sick and all, and this definitely isn't helping. 

So to get myself into a little more cheerful mood, I was thinking back on how much my parents did to make Christmas so special. It was just magical and so I just wanted to write some of what they did to create such fun memories!

1. On Christmas Eve after we fell asleep, my mom would always sneak in and put some black make-up  on our cheek to make it look like Santa had come in and given us a kiss and left some coal dust behind.

I always tried so hard to stay up and catch Santa giving me a smooch, but I never could! As we got older one Christmas we woke up without our yearly smooch....and we all were so sad. My mom thought we were too old for it and didn't think it mattered anymore. She definitely thought wrong! After we were all so devastated, my mom has still tried to do it every Christmas anyway. Never too old for Santa!

2. We always get new jamies every year on Christmas Eve....a lot of people have this tradition. But the thing that made this so fun for us was that the elves brought them to us! We would always wait for the doorbell to ring and every year, there would be our matching jamies on the front porch. We tried so hard to catch them, but I still to this day cannot figure out who would leave them there! This was so exciting for us to run upstairs with such excitement and was always our favorite part of the night. Don't forget about the fun of modeling them for everyone after, naturally ;).

3. On Christmas morning we always had to wait at the top of the stairs in the kitchen while my dad held up the blanket so we couldn't see how magically Santa had left all of our gifts. My mom waited at the bottom with the camera so she could capture our excited and surprised faces as my dad dropped the blanket. The excitement was almost too much! Those few minutes were seriously agonizing, and I know my dad made us wait longer than necessary because it was so fun to make us wait. The best was when I got older and understood how Christmas a little more to watch my younger siblings get so excited. I loved it. And we have a lot of hilarious videos of the shrieks and screams and gasps of excitement as we discovered what Santa had left us!

4. My mom always buys an ornament for each family member that best represents us for that year and then will write us a note about how much she loves us. When we are all married and have our own families, then we can take all the ornaments we have been given with us to decorate our own trees. They come with so many memories and I can look back and see all of the stages of life we were in. So fun to decorate the tree every year! So now we have our nice tree upstairs, and downstairs we have all of our personal and funny ornaments where we open our presents. One of my favorite traditions. She also get's the family a book that we read on Christmas Eve all together before we go to bed. She writes the year and some of the big events in the front of the book so we can remember the great times we had. 

5. On Christmas Eve we have all of the family over at our house for dinner with lot's of delicious foods! We play games and do a lot of laughing and talking, but my personal favorite....we always do karaoke. It is hilarious, and I don't know how this tradition started, but we do it every year. Wish everyone could hear my dad sing Hearts of Fire by Earth, Wind, and Fire. It's so classic, and a must.

6. Christmas is such a time of giving and service. Every year we find some way to give like feeding the homeless, picking a family to surprise, angel tree, visiting the elderly, or giving in our ward. My favorite year I can ever remember was feeding the homeless at Magleby's. Nothing like helping others to bring the Christmas spirit and remind us of the ultimate example of charity, Jesus Christ.

7. Christmas movies. Enough said. 

 

I can literally quote The Grinch from beginning to end, word for word. It is my favorite movie of all time! I just also love Elf so much as well. They never ever get old to me.

8. Boyfriends and crushes at Christmas are the best. I remember my first experience with Christmas "love" was when me and a kid named Marcus were "going out" in 5th grade and he brought me Bath and Body Works lotion for my present. It was so cute. Of course as I got older, it became more romantic and I have some really great memories at Christmastime. I can't wait til' I find my one true love and get to share Christmas with him because I know it will just become more and more magical. 

There are many more wonderful memories that made my childhood incredible, but this post would go on forever if I wrote them all down. For now, these are some of the things that I will always cherish and traditions I will keep with my kiddies one day. I'm so grateful for parents who rock and who tried so hard to make every year so special and amazing! 

Thanks to them, I still believe in Santa :).

Merry Christmas everyone!

And prayers to all those families whose Christmas is going to be difficult this year because of their loss.

I hope that somehow, some way, they can find some peace during this season.

More later...