It’s day 12 and today’s post will be, to a certain extent, a celebration of normality if you will…

I can’t say that today’s memory is of one thing in particular, rather it’s about 2-3 things that were part of pretty much every Christmas, when we were living in Canada.

Ready?

Is this first Christmas Memory post you’re seeing?
You can get caught up by starting back on day 1 to understand this year’s theme.

Church, Turkey Dinner & Christmas Plays

Our live pretty much revolved around church and our church was fortunate to have a team of first class decorators, meaning there were always beautiful displays that could serve as backdrops for some Christmas-themed photos – where heavily staged or more spontaneous (You‘re likely to see a few more over the span of the other memories to come).

Church life also meant that our kids were usually involved in the Sunday School Christmas program. Every year a new theme, new costumes, new lines to memorize & songs to learn. A couple of long Saturday-afternoon practises and budda-bing, budda-boom… you were half-way to Christmas.

Turkey Dinner

Turkey dinners were wonderful and Liz did an incredible job preparing all the fixings. She never grew up eating turkey dinner… it’s a very North American thing and remember … she’s an Italian raised in Belgium. She grew up eating lots of great food… but turkey dinner wasn’t on the menu.

The table was dressed with china, silverware & crystal that came from my Grandmother Long. My maternal grandmother’s contribution was the jellied cucumber salad and a glass & silver pickle dish.

It may seem strange & perhaps even bordering on materialistic to mention such details, but these were all things that dressed the Christmas dinner tables of my youth… they were a familiar… they were a connection to my past and the vehicles of my Christmas memories.

Of course memories live in the mind, the memory and perhaps even, metaphorically, the heart, but attached to something tangible and there’s an extra certain je-ne-sais-quoi. I do miss some of those things…

Thank you sharing this memory and…