I Remember

I got thinking yesterday about the Christmases I remember from growing up. I realize it's kind of shallow, but mostly I remember the presents I got. Here are some of the things I remember best about Christmas.

I remember the Christmas I got my Mary Lou Retton leotards previously mentioned. I got the American flag one, one that was black, pink and purple, and a nifty pink roll-up exercise mat.

I remember the Christmas I got my Cabbage Patch doll. Her name is Monica Zara- she was bald except for a litte patch of yellow hair on her head. I remember looking for the autograph on the butt and thinking how cool it was that I had a real Cabbage Patch doll and not a fake one.

I remember the Christmas we were in Florida. See, we always did the Nativity and would pick parts out of a hat to see who was what. I remember that when we were Wise Men, we would wear Mom & Dad's bathrobes and wrap a towel around our head. Well, this particular year, JD (13 at the time) drew the part of Mary and I think it was Erin (2 at the time) was Joseph. They switched, but it was awesome. I was usually a Wise Man or a camel and we had this awesome yellow rocking cradle that we would use for a manger.

See, in our house, we weren't allowed to wake up at 4:00 a.m. and just tear into our presents. We could wake up whenever, but we were not allowed to come out of our rooms until 7:00. Then we all sat around and Dad would pass out presents, one to each person, and we would open them one at a time and look at what everyone else got. Usually, what would happen is that we'd all sleep in one room and around 4:00, people start waking up, but nobody says anything for a while and then finally someone says, "hey, is anyone else awake?" and pretty soon, we were all laying there in varying states of consctiousness and talking until we could come out to the family room. One year, when we lived in Colorado and there were 7 of us, we got a whistle and re-enacted the Von Trapp children marching down the stairs in "Sound of Music" while we went down to the family room.

We've had the same breakfast for Christmas for as long as I can remember. It's always been eggs, sausage, oranges and orange juice. A few years ago, we started having sticky buns with the rest of the stuff. We also have basically the same Christmas dinner- ham (Mom makes the best ham gravy in the world!), mashed potatoes, ribbon salad, all sorts of good things like that.

The past couple of years, we have also gone to movies on Christmas. Last year, we went and saw "We Are Marshall" and this year, we've already planned to go see "National Treasure 2: Book of Secrets". We are huge fans of the first movie and planned to go see the second one almost as soon as we figured out when it was coming out.

Mostly the thing I remember about Christmas growing up is just having fun playing with new toys and hanging out with my family testing, breaking in and sometimes just breaking stuff we got.

Have a great holiday!