For some reason, this was the hardest block of time to document in my Memories of Christmas series. There just aren’t a lot of holiday pictures for these years or else I just don’t have them.
I do know why I don’t have a lot of pictures from 1985 – It’s because I spent November-February like this:
Pardon my modesty word strip and notice that I had a cast from the top of my thigh down to my toes. I had my leg broken surgically to correct a problem I was born with. I shared a few details back in this post. Someday, I need to write down the whole story. I don’t remember a lot about this particular Christmas except for my brother Mike keeping me company while I camped out in the spare bedroom hide-a-bed. I couldn’t get up and down the stairs to sleep in my own room. Also my friend Jeff came to see me a lot. Yes, the very same Jeff that I ended up marrying! He has always been a great guy!
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1984 was the Christmas of my Sophomore year in high school. This picture is pretty blurry, but this is me at age 15. I sort of had a boyfriend but we weren’t dating yet since I wasn’t 16. It’s a long story. He was 18 and he looked at least 25, and could have passed for older than that even. When I first met him, I thought he was a teacher. (My parents must have freaked out when I brought him home! lol!) He was a very nice guy though, he just looked a lot older than he was. Anyway, I remember being very excited to see what he would get me for Christmas and spending a lot of time trying to figure out what to get him. You know what’s funny? I don’t remember what we did end up getting each other! It ended up being a very non-important memory for me, which my 15 year old self would have never believed.
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1983 where art thou? I can’t seem to find a single Christmas photo in my stash from 1983. I guess I will go with a choir photo because I spent A LOT of time performing with the 9th grade girl’s chorus that year for the holidays. I remember going all over the place to perform at retirment homes, malls, and schools. Our choir director insisted that we enunciated the word “Christmas” as we sang so that it sounded like “Christ-MOSS”. It was ridiculous. She would yell and slap her hand on the piano if we didn’t do it right so we all lived in fear. Rumor also had it that she had a wooden hand and that was why she could hit the piano so hard.
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1982 was a fun Christmas that I actually seem to remember the most out of this group of years. My Mom had recently taken up tole painting and this was one of her first projects. It was a jewelry box that I used for more than 20 years. Thanks Mom!
And she made me this porcelain doll. It sits on a shelf in my home today, in the guest room where my Mom sleeps when she comes to visit.
My robe was a gift from my parents when they went to San Francisco and left my brother and I with my Grandparents. That is the only time I remember them doing that. Looks like my Dad was the photographer that morning which is funny because I don’t remember him taking a lot of pictures when I was growing up.
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Want to play along? Do you have photos of the holidays from your early teen years? Who took them? What do you remember about those years? Are there any years that you have no photographs for? Pick a picture that represents a Christmas memory, even if it is from a different time period and journal about it (like my choir photo for 1983).
