What our your favorite Christmas memories?

Thought it would be fun to start a topic on this. Mine would have to be when I was a kid. I got the coveted green machien. It was basicaly a big wheel that kind of looked like a chopper. My friend Kevin and I each got one. I think I was only 6 at the time. We spent the entire day riding them.


C-ya,
Jimmy

I remember those Green Machines. I never got one but wanted one really bad. I didnt even have a Big wheel
My favorite Christmas memories was our Silver metal tree with ancient purple balls on it and two lights that changed colors and the tree spun and played silent night. Mom had one candle called bayberry, she set it out at christmas and it made the house smell like what I consider christmas to smell like.....
I remember one year I got a desk for Christmas with two pens, a red one and a black one. That was a HUGE Christmas.

Going downtown (Chicago) to look at the windows at Marshall Field's. We did that every year when I was a little kidlet.

Loved ones gone. ;-(

Well my worst Christmas memory would be when I had to go drag my brother out of the crackhouse, and sit up with him all night while he went through detox.

I know I'm such a wet blanket!

Probably the best ones are from 1979 when we had the blizzard here in Ohio. Our electric went off. My mom & dad would light these big tall frosted glass candles that they had. They would put a bunch of them on the coffee table, all together, and then turn out the lights, and my dad would tell us stories from when he was growing up, and we would make shadow puppets on the ceiling. We liked it so much that we started doing it every year and my mom would get out the fudge and cream cheese candy, and/or hard tack candy and nuts/nutcracker. Sometimes we'd build a fire in the fireplace. My dad was kinda grouchy about the fireplace, though even though he built that thing himself and worked his butt of on it - you'd think he'd be proud of it and want to always have fires in it but w/e, lol!

Jimmie I got a Green Machine, too one year! LOL

I also got this thing called an Inchworm when I was like three or four. It had little wheels and you bounced on it to make it go.

Also going back even further there was a friend of my grandma's named Mr. Clark who gave me a teddy bear one year, that was as big as I was. Me and "Clark bear" were inseperable, and Clark bear still sits on a shelf in our bedroom, with a Christmas dress on.

Then there was the year when I was 12 and got a new 10 speed bike. It was freezing cold out, and icy, but I just had to ride it. So, I rode it into town and went to Lawson's hoping they were open despite it being Christmas. They were, and I got a candy bar, but not before I totally wiped out really bad on the ice, tearing up both the handlebars and myself! So much for my new bike. That wasn't the last time I ate pavement on that bike, either...I ended up rear ending a parked pickup, and then later on I got hit by a car on it.

I know, I know, wet blanket.....LOL

My brothers and I used to build snow forts during the blizzard. We would just find a big drift and dig it out. Then we would dig holes in the walls and put candles in them. One time we made a fort (one with built walls, not from a drift) that had a wooden roof with snow packed on top of it. It was big enough that both of my brothers and I (Vince would have been 18 that year and Wes would have been 13...I was 7) all three fit in it, with some neighbor kids and our collie, Scamp. No lie it was that huge.

Also I was just telling John about this big pond by our house that used to freeze over and we would go ice skating on it, me and my dad & brothers. My dad would pull me all over this pond on my sled, right up to beaver dams and everything - it was really out in the country back then. It's a state nature preserve now and is all fenced off and surrounded by housing complexes. But when we got home from either that, sledding or playing in the snow, my mom would have made a huge pot of homemade hot chocolate from scratch. So last night I made some. John was like no big deal hot chocolate, whatever, at first - but then he tried it and said it was "heavenly". It is certainly nothing like anything from a little pouch. Especially if you put a candy cane, whipped cream, and/or marshmallows in it!



We also used to get these enormous barber pole candy canes and my brother Vince would sit on the bed with his in his mouth, 12 string in hand and play Led Zeppelin and Rush songs.....LOL