Christmas Nostalgia

I remember growing up, we'd always spend our Christmas Eve at home in NJ.  This involved us sitting around the dining table having a huge Christmas feast that mom prepared single-handedly and then going to midnight services at our church where at least one of our family sang in the choir at any given time.  As children, we'd wake up incredibly early, sometimes sneaking into see what was in our stockings, sometimes being super sneaky and untaping our gifts before we went to wake up our parents, who insisted that waking them up before 8am was verboten.

After presents, we'd have a hearty breakfast and load into our old Buick to go to Pennsylvania to go my mother's childhood home for a second Christmas.  We'd then have a huge Christmas dinner.  I still laugh that my sisters and I were at a "children's" card table late into our teens and perhaps even into our twenties!  

But it was the drive up to the grandparent's house that I'm remembering with this page.  As we crossed the border into Pennsylvania, going over the Delaware, we'd then follow the river upstream for a ways.  On this particular Christmas, the scenery was beautiful enough for my father to stop the car and take a picture.  I'm glad he did because it reminds me of the singing, the sisterly squabbles, the cries of "Don't touch me!  Dad, she's touching me!  Don't look at me!  Mom! She's looking at me," but mostly a time gone by when we were kids and together as a family.


For directions on how to make this page, please go to the Creative Memories Digital Project Center.  Directions are for SBC+ and sbcStudio.