Christmas traditions

[janice6]

When I was young after my mom left, we had no tradition.  For many years it was another day just like any other.

When I had my family, we celebrated like all the others, together.  Then we made visits to my In-laws so they could play with our kids.  They were nice people.

Now my kids are of retirement age, and we have such a large extended family we meet at the largest house.  Today it was my oldest daughter's home.  For Christmas Eve dinner and gift exchange.

My fun this Christmas was that I bought fashion leather boots for one of my great granddaughters and black patent leather shoes with a 1" heel and a nice bow on the toes for the youngest Great Granddaughter.  I laughed and told them "All the girls are wearing them".

The toddler wore her "heels" all night.  It was fun, she didn't fall but looked like she was going downhill all afternoon.  the older one wouldn't take her "fashion boots" off except when she went outside with the puppies.  Then she took them off to keep them clean so she could wear them at home in the house.

I thought it would be fun with the shoes, but I greatly underestimated how much!

We talked and ate all day and it reminded me of how much I like all the members of my family.  They are a great bunch!  (I say that because, "You can't pick family, but you can pick friends - My family are truly my friends)

My oldest daughter's husband was the one with 5 bypasses last month.  He is doing great and back to work, so it was a wonderful time to be with him too.

Mom didn't get any presents, but she has been getting jewelry every day for the past week in the mail and it will continue through next week.  She is like a kid in a candy store opening the mail every day.

She showed her battery heated Winter jacket to the waitresses at Denny's yesterday and told them she was disappointed that with the different heat zones in the jacket, it still didn't have a "vibrate function".  It brought down the house.

Merry Christmas to you all!  

 

[Historian]

This year was different:   Let me brag about my men. This is my first Christmas in charge of the group.  

I guess there are about 350 in the organization at the moment in our region. 

The reality is there are hundreds of thousands of us around the world doing projects just like the one's listed here.  But i get to command a company of decent lads in charity.

We have feed about 100 families in our region a full week with real food and gifts of the season, our coats for kids program has brought in about 40 coats for children in need, a similar VA based program brought in about 30 pairs of shoes and we lost count of the socks.  We have a turkey program as well that has provided about 400 free turkeys to the area. This does not include the massive amount of food we have delivered to Catholic Charities.  We also made the Marines smile (hard to do) when we showed up with a treasure trove of items for Toys for Tots.

This list also includes a lot of labor the men put in to help people.   This month we finished a free wheel chair ramp for a little old lady.   You should have seen her eyes when we showed up.

This is a small rural county with need.   I think our population is about 130,000 so you can see what kind of impact this has.

What a wonderful time of year.