Saturday, December 18, 2010

Flashback Friday (On Saturday)

Here I am again, a day late and a dollar short! Oh well, I'm playing anyway!




This week's Flashback Friday was about Christmas presents. My sister asked if I'd participate (I was planning to anyway.) If you haven't read her response, check it out here. I haven't read it yet, so you be the judge: Do you think we shared
the same Christmas or not?

1961

Growing up, we celebrated Christmas on Christmas Day. No presents were opened before Christmas. Being one of ten children, we drew names. (Can you image having to get nine presents every year for your siblings!!) We also drew names with our cousins who lived in Texas. That was a hoot...getting a gift for a cousin that you really didn't know very well. Sometimes the presents were homemade but I remember most of them being bought. And I think we paid using our own money as we got older. I really don't remember Mom paying for them. We would gather around the kitchen table and wrap our presents. That's funny, isn't it, because here you are wrapping a present for a sibling that may or may not be across from you or next to you but definitely there with you.

At first, Santa didn't wrap his presents. He did, of co
urse, have to put names on the gifts he brought so we'd know whose was whose.


1964 or 1965

Later, he did start wrapping the gifts.

1970 or 1971

There are a few things I remember getting for Christmas: a googly, a ring, a bracelet, dolls, nightgowns (that Mom usually made). My younger sister and I are close in age so it seems like we got a lot of the same thing, only in a different color...except the googly.

The googly was a type of stuffed animal that when you squeezed the stomach, the eyes, which were plastic with colored spiral cardboard in them, went around. The body was blue and the hands and feet were pick. My sister and I both got one one year exactly the same. I guess my sister wanted to be able to tell them apart so she wrote her initials on one of the feet of her googly.

I still have the bracelet I received. I was holding on to it for the daughter I never had...guess I'll keep holding on to it for my granddaughter?


My bracelet and my ring (I think that was the ring...it still fits so I'm not 100%)

And, yes, by sister got one also, only with her name on the bracelet and her birthstone!

The stockings were filled with nuts, candy, and a tangerine, always. There was usually some little toy or such as well.

Sadly, I don't remember buying my parents gifts. I know some years we went in together to buy them a gift.

I do remember there have been years when it has been chaotic on Christmas morning. But that is what made it fun!

3 comments:

  1. Fun to read yours and your sister's memories! You even posted the same or a similar picture!

    No worries about being "late"!

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  2. I completely forgot about the Googly! We wrote our names on the back so we'd know which one was which! I had completely forgotten about the bracelet & ring, too! I can't believe you still have those!!!
    This was fun! :D

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  3. My family isn't QUITE as large as yours was, but we purchased gifts for every one of our siblings. Mom and Dad gave each of us kids a dollar for each of our siblings ($6 total) to purchase gifts with. We supplemented from our own money, but generally we ended up pooling resources together to get a "big" (still less than $10) gift for another sibling. It could be very interesting because any one of us could be "going in on" three or four gifts for three or four different people--and we had to keep each gift (and the group of people we were "going in on" with) a secret from the others.

    Now that we're all older, we draw names. It's not quite as easy to find $5 gifts that everyone likes--so it's handier to just buy a decent-sized gift for one person instead of buying a small gift for each person.

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