Both Greg and I were raised celebrating Family at Christmas time and most of the Christmas times of the last 40 years were tied to family togetherness. So even though it is April I can’t consider our tears together without a heavy portion of Christmas reminiscing.
Christmas ‘82 and ‘83 at the jr college where we met we were living “in sin” but already married in our hearts, just not on paper. But we always said the paper is for other people. The commitment between us we do for just us.
So the first year he went home to Newcastle where his older siblings also came back to their parents. And I went back to my parents home. And the next year he had a huge deal surgery over Christmas break so I spent a few days in Billings Montana with friends do I could be at the hospital every day. Then his family all came to his sisters new house in my parents hometown and we ended up joining together with our four parents and my grandma. His five siblings and a brother in law and my two brothers. He was pretty out of it having had his femur sawed in two with a staircase pattern so it could be pulled apart and moved over one step and thus lengthened. But in his codeine haze he missed a lot of the family celebration.
The next year we were married and in Ashland Oregon and too broke to go home. We got my first ever real tree for Christmas and left it up until Valentines Day. I never loved a tree more but that year I loved the scent the touch and the lights. And we found a lovely angel we got cheap because her face was cracked. And then it wasn’t even cracked but had a thread of hot melt glue we easily removed.
Over the years and as the family grew we traveled mostly to Wyoming in all kinds of winter weather and did it with kids in car seats they filled with diarrhea or with 1100 miles driven and suddenly snowed into a motel and missing the family anyway. We don’t one Christmas at Disneyland and three in a row at a parents funeral. We spent one with all our children so angry at me that they wouldn’t come home and we spent one with a granddaughter in the ER for six hours. But every friend. Sibling parent grandparent and child was always reminded that getting together as a family was important and worth even major inconvenience just to sit around a living room bursting at the seems with those who mattered.
