Sharing Memories (Week 50): Decorating For the Holiday Season

It's Week 50 of our Sharing Memories - A Genealogy Journey for 2011.

Please join us each Sunday as we share our memories of childhood. Your descendants will be thankful that you did! Share a memory here as a comment, or on your own blog, or in a private journal, but write! Leave a legacy for your children and grandchildren.

Lorine at Christmas - see the long skinny Santas?

This week I want to talk about decorating for the holidays. Did you celebrate Christmas? Did you have a Christmas tree? Perhaps you had other celebrations during the holiday season. Sharing your memories of those special times in December will be a wonderful gift to pass on to your children and grandchildren.

We had a rather scrawny Christmas tree each year my dad was alive. I remember helping to decorate it with skinny Santas with their twisty legs, spinning spirals made out of some shiny material and lots and lots of tinsel!

We always strung the Christmas cards that came in the mail up on string along one wall. The string went from corner to corner like a clothesline and it held the cards by their folded edge.

We wrapped gifts in Christmas wrap from a roll of cheap Christmas paper - no Christmas gift bags in those days! They went under the tree and we kids tried every day to guess what was in them - picking them up and shaking and turning them repeatedly in our attempt to figure out the surprise.

After my dad died my mom bought an artificial tree - in white! Then she put away or threw out all the old decorations and bought new ones - all in blue. So we had what for me was the ugliest Christmas tree ever - all white and blue.

I wish I had some of those old decorations but they are long gone.  Now I buy vintage Christmas ornaments at flea markets and antique stores but I've never found the long skinny Santas that I remember so well from childhood.