Advent Memories Day 12 : Rock Candy

Growing up, my mom had a dear, older friend in our church named Mildred.  I don't know how old Mildred is, but I'm amazed that she is still alive (although not kicking quite as hard these days).  Mildred was an expert at making rock candy and my mom decided one year that it would be fun to have Mildred over to teach us during the Holiday season.  I was definitely on board!  I don't remember the whole process, but there were candy thermometers and food coloring and all kinds of flavorings.  We made a TON of rock candy that day in many different flavors.  We had our Christmas gifts for friends, teachers, etc... for the year!  Mom and I had a blast and immediately decided it would become an annual tradition!  After making rock candy all morning and afternoon, I left the house to go somewhere with friends (I'm going to guess the Columbia Mall...because where else did we go in Junior High?).  When I came home that evening, I walked in the door and was welcomed by the extremely strong vapors of all the flavors we used that day.  It was so potent!  So much that it made me sick to my stomach and I had to make a mad dash for the toilet!  I've never been too big of a rock candy fan since then and our plans of making it a tradition were squashed...we've never made it since!  But I do love that I have a special memory of a day spent with Mildred and mom.

Advent Memories Day 11 : Nanny's Gang

For all our Christmases in Texas, until I was 15, we spent Christmas Eve with my dad's side of the family. In my youngest years, it was all of Nanny's crew who came along. Nanny was my great-grandmother and although my memories of her are few and rather vague, she was a sweet little lady who was a very petite 4'9" (or maybe 4'8"). She was my dad's mother's mother. She had 3 children: my Mammaw, Buster, and Marion. Mammaw's crew included my immediate family, plus my Aunt Becky, Uncle Chris and their 3 kids...my 1st cousins! Buster was killed in WWII and left behind his wife, Ruth (who happens to be my cousin on my mom's side of the family...weird, I know!) and their baby girl, Carol Sue. Carol Sue continued to have Christmas Eve with her father's family thru the years, so she was always there with her husband Ken and children Rusty and Amanda who seemed worlds older than my 1st cousins, Beth and I. Marion came along with her son, Tony and his wife Betty and children Lisa and David. Lisa and David were close in age to Rusty and Amanda so the four of them had a blast together while I was part of the younger kids crew with Beth, Nicole, Amy and Christopher. It was such a fun night for all of us!  There was delicious food, lots of gifts to open, and so much time to play with cousins. Those evenings felt like eternity to me...we must have started early and stayed well into the night, or at least it seemed like it to me. I remember running laps around my cousins' neighborhood and working up a sweat in Texas where it was often a little warm at Christmas (it was often very cold too...there was the one Christmas where everyone lost power in an ice storm). I remember the older cousins hauling us smaller ones on their backs around the yard. I remember it as such a happy, joyful time.

Nanny died when I was in the 4th grade and sometime after that the dynamics of Christmas Eve changed up a bit. Carol Sue and Tony and their families stopped coming at some point and our Christmas Eve became just Mammaw's crew. Also, at some point, we stopped calling Carol Sue by that name and we now call her Susie. I suppose it was the same with my mom at some point as she used to go by Katie Kay in her younger years...at least around family, and at some point became just Kay.

Ever since my parents moved back to Texas, we've started having Christmas Eve with Susie and her clan again, so that has been fun to revive an old tradition. Tony and Becky's clans have moved away from Dallas, so they miss out on Christmas Eve (although almost all of Becky's crew did make it to Dallas once a few years ago)! I think Nanny would be pleased to know that all her grandkids still keep in touch and love each other and even make an effort to see each other and spend time together. Hope my cousins and I can say the same in 30-years!

Advent Memories Day 10 : Road Trip!

My first 15 Christmases included Road Trips. All the way from Columbia, Mo to Dallas. I think it originally took us about 12 hours to do this drive, but over the years as us kids got older and roads improved, I think the fam cut it to about 10 (and I think I personally could do it in 9 when I got to college and did it on my own). I have several memories of these long drives in the car. Unfortunately, many of them are not so great! I don't think they negatively effected me too much though.
-- Fighting over backseat space with my sister. My parents solved this little issue when I was 9 by purchasing a vehicle with a 3rd seat.

-- Throwing up. I used to get very car sick and would throw up at least once every trip. I'm not sure when I finally outgrew this (although, I still get car sick in NYC taxis).

-- Games. We had car bingo and we always played the ABC billboard sign game. I think we knew exactly where every Q and every Z was along the route.

-- Being carried to the car at the crack o' dawn in my PJs. In my youngest years, we'd leave super early and mom and dad didn't bother to wake me up. Guess they thought they could get a few hours of driving in silence out of it.

-- Rolling into Dallas after sunset. When I was really little, I didn't know where we were most of the way through Missouri and Oklahoma, but I knew when we were driving into to Dallas. The roads would be bigger and the lights would shine brighter. I also had a sign that we were almost to my grandparent's house...the piano store on Central Expressway. I think it went out of business in recent years (it was still there for at least part of the time I lived in Dallas post-college). It was a really big piano store with huge windows so you could see all kinds of grand pianos. As soon as I saw that, I knew Grammy's house was just around the bend.

Advent Memories Day 9 : Ants in my Pants

There was one Christmas when I got a rocket - I think it was an Uncle Don gift. I can't remember exactly how it worked, but I think you filled it with water and then there was a pump thing you used and then it would shoot into the air at crazy heights. Don often gave gifts the whole family enjoyed playing with on Christmas Day and this was one of them. At the time, my grandparents lived in a house with a lot of land and a parking lot out back...the perfect place for rocket shooting. We all went outside together and took turns shooting it off. A few minutes into our outdoor excursion, I realized that my legs were burning and I started screaming. I had been standing on a Fire Ant hill. We pulled up my pant legs to discover there were fire ants EVERYwhere. My mom helped me pull off my shoes and socks and we were trying to brush all the ants off my pants...it was awful. I had sooooo many bites all over my legs and feet.

My Grandaddy came to the rescue that day. He had a friend who homemade this organic ointment stuff and Grandaddy just happened to have a little bottle of it in his bathroom. I have absolutely no idea what it was, but it sure took the pain and itch out of my bites quickly!

I like a lot of things about Texas. Fire Ants are not one of them.

Advent Memories Day 8 : Uncle Don's Great Gifts

My Uncle Don didn't have any kids until I was 13-years-old when he acquired 2 through marriage. Until that time, he loved lavishing Beth and I with terrific gifts at Christmas. They were always a surprise and they were always awesome! He also liked making the gift giving/opening a little bit more fun and interactive. The year I remember best was when I was 10 and I opened a very heavy gift from Don to discover 2 bricks! But, attached to the bricks was an envelope and inside the envelope was a single key...no note. It was up to me to figure out what the key went to. We figured out that it fit the back of his Bronco. And in the back of his Bronco was a shiny new 10-Speed bike! I loved it and used it like crazy for a few years until I got to an age where I thought I was too cool to ride a bike anymore (little did I know!). Don always helped make Christmas a little more exciting and fun!

Advent Memories Day 7 : Stocking Stuffers

Most of my childhood Christmas mornings were spent at my Grammy's house (or houses actually...Grandaddy was a house builder and so they moved a lot).  There would be breakfast while the gift opening began.  My mom always made sure our stockings were stuffed to the brim and they were always the first thing Beth & I got to open.  They usually contained some pretty fun stuff and smaller things that we really wanted to needed.  They also always had some very random stuff inside...I think my mom just wanted to make sure they were full, but to not spend a ton of money on each thing inside.  One year, she gave Beth and I each a bar of Faberge Soap and it had something printed on it like "Faberge Baby".  "Faberge, baby" became a common phrase around our household for years.  And when Beth & I never used our bars of soap, we found them in our stockings again the next year...ha!  Another year, my mom had taken the volunteer job of combing the hair of all the students at Fairview Elementary before their school pictures were taken.  In an effort to be clean they provided her with a huge sack of combs.  At the end of the day, she was sent home with the leftover combs and there must have been hundreds of them.  That bag of combs was in our hall closet for years and my mom would find any means of getting rid of them, short of just throwing them away.  This meant that most years Beth and I would find one in our stockings.  Oh, joy!  It was pretty hilarious though and the running jokes about what would be in our stockings kept us entertained.

Advent Memories Day 6 : Snowmobiling

The Christmas we spent in Monarch, CO with my aunt, uncle, and cousins was a great one!  So fun to all be staying together in a cabin in the middle of the mountains on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day.  There were 16-17 of us staying together, including 2 tiny babies.  We skiied, ate well, and played lots of games.  We also had some adventures in snowmobiling.  Because there were so many of us, we had to go in 2 groups at different times.  The first group to go consisted of Beth & Brian and Nicole & Jason and their 2 oldest children.  They came home and said it was so easy-going and fun.  So, the next group set out...mom & I, Nathan & Amy, and Becky & Chris.  We had no kids with us like the first group and apparently that put us on the more extreme ride!  It was really scary.  My mom and I got thrown off our snowmobile pretty hard at least 2 times and my mom got the biggest bruise I've ever seen!  And even worse....Aunt Becky broke her ankle on the ride!!  It was crazy.  And, unfortunately, that experience instilled in me a hatred for snowmobiling.  Kind of wish I had been with the 1st group!