It’s been a very long time since I’ve posted here. I gave Barbara the reason that I’ve been busy, which is true, at least some of the time, but the other part of the reason is that…well, I just don’t really know. It’s not so much about being busy as it is about being overwhelmed by all the things out there, possibly to be done. If that makes sense. But that sounds like another post, one I’m not quite ready to do today, because today I have a little Christmas dinner to cook, and then maybe some Christmas movies to watch, because after all…we are on our Christmas Break!
So, this being Christmas Day, and Christmas so much in the air, I thought I’d start back here with a few quick glimpses of Christmas Past. Actually, I have a LOT of Christmas photos…somewhere…but it would be complicated to find them all. So I’ll just start with these few today.
First of all, here are a couple of me as a kid, with each of my grandfathers, who, in Polish, are called “Dzydzyie,” though I’m sure I’m not spelling that correctly. (In the second picture, I’m on the left, and my sister Terry is on the right.)
The Polish grandmother is “Babcie,” and I feel a little more certain about that spelling, though I’m not sure I have any Christmas photos of me with my Babcies. And why? Because any good Babcie, on Christmas Day, is in the kitchen COOKING an enormous feast for her family, and doesn’t have any time for hanging out with the grandkids around the Christmas tree. But since Dzydzyies do have time for things like that (they are sort of an enhanced version of “Fun Dad”), here are my childhoods pics of me with my Dzydzyies.
Now we move ahead many years to when I have kids of my own, and here we find Joey and Mary making an early visit to Santa Claus at the Mall. It appears in the picture that they are past the point of being terrified by Santa’s big white beard, and I would guess no tears were shed or screams heard on this visit. I have another great picture of me and Terry visiting Santa way back in 1963 or 1964, and if I can find that picture later, I’ll put that up as well.
And finally (for now, anyway) we see Mary and Joey at Christmas a few years down the road from the last picture. You can tell they’re a little older, and once again, don’t those kids just love to hang around the Christmas tree? If you look closely, you’ll notice that Joey has a bird on his shoulder. That’s “Buddy,” who started out being our bird (Mary’s dad got the bird for her on her sixth birthday) but he soon went to live with my dad, Mary and Joey’s Dzydzyie, and spent many many years being pampered and having the best possible life a bird could ever expect to have.
Well, that’s it for now! Even though I am not yet a Babcie (actually, I don’t know if there will ever be any more “Babcies” in our family, that kind of lifestyle is probably too much a thing of the past, now) I still have some cooking and baking to do, and a nice, quiet Christmas to spend with my hubby on this, one of the first days of our long-awaited Christmas Break!
I was talking to someone about past Christmases at my parent’s house and I remember that my mom and dad always had that really ugly tree in the front window in the Living Room. And looking at that picture brought back memories. And yes, that tree is very sad looking, but I remember those were the best Christmases because all of my brothers, and their families would be there.
And those are my fondest memories when I think of Christmas past. Thank you, Chrissy for that photo of my father, he was a very hansome man and very kind and quiet and always very loving to us.
Barbara, it’s so good to hear you say all those wonderful things about your father. I regret that I never got to know him very well, mainly because of the language barrier. But it’s nice to know he was a kind, good man.
Now, as for the tree…are you saying that was not a REAL tree? That was an artificial tree, so thin and bare?? I didn’t know!