TOD
A few early Christmases stand out, for being out of our established routine of Christmas morning gifts. One, at about my age ten, we'd just moved into my still-favorite house (in Columbus), and either later on Christmas Day or perhaps the day after, my sister and I were to get our first airplane flight, to Fort Lauderdale to visit our grandmother for a week. She'd moved down there earlier that year, and this eventually precipitated our family moving there the following year. That was an exciting and magical Christmas.
There were a couple of them in Florida that, also due to a breaking of routine, stand out in my memory, at least one of them due only to doing gifts on Christmas Eve instead of Christmas morning. That was new to all of us, and was more fun than we thought it would be. (We did it because of my mom's new schedule of working nights in the local emergency room, a job she dearly loved.) In that and maybe a consecutive year, a few of my gifts started being LPs -- original cast albums, Andy Williams, Vaughan Meader's "First Family", that kind of currently popular thing -- and those were the start, which I'll never forget, of a lifetime of records.
One Christmas in L.A., I think it was 1975, my parents came out for the week and we spent Christmas Eve downtown on Olvera Street watching Mexican pageants and such. The following day we drove down to Tustin to visit a cousin who'd recently moved out there, and because of the proximity to Disneyland we couldn't resist spending the rest of the day and evening there, which was surprisingly nice.
A few years later I spent the entire holiday week on my friends' 51-foot sailboat moored in Cabo San Lucas, which was a whole different world from what it was to become only a few years later. That visit, in turn, inspired a couple of future trips to spend time with them in various ports while on their trip from L.A. to the Caribbean and back.
Author
Topic: 'TWAS THE NIGHT BEFORE CHRISTMAS AND A CREATURE WAS STIRRING (Read 21458 times)