Ghosts of Christmas Past- Kate Edition

Today the post is written by my niece Kate. As I've been writing about Christmas it was all about family. I didn't want to tell Kate's story so I asked her to do a guest blog post. Without further explanation here is what Kate sent me.

There are some people who don't enjoy the holidays and the idea of forced family time being thrust upon them, gives them hives or worse yet the twitch eye. These are the people who suffer through the most wonderful time of year by avoiding the parties, the shops, the lights and the Christmas carols. They survive the Christmas festivities they cannot escape by adding extra *nog* in their eggnog, consoling themselves with cookies and praying it'll all be over quickly. These folks are in the Bah Humbug club. They want nothing to do with Christmas- for them the sooner it's over the better!
I'm not among that scrooge crowd and I never have been as you can see above. I love sending cards, belting out Christmas carols, baking cookies, visiting displays of holiday lights, watching White Christmas, Holiday Inn, Christmas in Connecticut...the whole bit- I'm a creature who takes comfort in the rituals and traditions and tales of Christmas past. It is probably why I have been enjoying the Ghost's of Christmas past series my Uncle Jeff has been featuring in his blog and relishing the photos from before my birth. Not only am I the sentimental sort, I, like my uncle also studied history in college. He has asked me to be a guest on his blog and recount my memories of our family Christmases.

This first picture in our journey is from a Sutor Christmas I can't remember. Here I sit on the floor at my great grandparent's home the "big house" with my Grandma Anna and my cousins Jeremy and Tamara chewing my dress in my excitement over Christmas. Ok, maybe I was just teething, but you can see the awe in my face and the joy in Jeremy's over our new trikes in the next photo. Check out the orange and brown shag carpeting. You'll see that again in a few years.

The next photo is from many years later and around the time I really remember celebrating Christmas with my cousins. My sister and I only have three cousins and growing up we were each other's best friends. This picture was taken at their Monroe street house. In this photo we are all captivated by the new TV that Uncle Jeff and Aunt Carol got. It was the first one I remember them owning- it was 1987. On it we are watching The Goonies a movie that would shape a lot of the escapades we cousins got into in the next few years. In the bottom left corner sits my cousin John, My cousin Jeremy, my sister Ellen and I are crammed into one giant chair enjoying the movie and just being together. My cousin's Grandma Bybee is in the background of this picture.

In the year after we watched the Goonies, we formed a club we called Double Trouble, named after Grandma Bybee's dog. The DT club's mission was to have fun and for us kids to stick together. One of our schemes was to bake and decorate cookies as a group on our trip to see Uncle Dave and Aunt Roya in Des Moines. We saved our allowances and solicited spare change from our parents so that we'd be able to buy extra special cookie ingredients including lots of sprinkles! When we arrived ready to bake I remember Aunt Roya saying she wasn't really a cook or a baker and Uncle Dave stepping in and saving the day. Look at him mixing dough and making frosting!

There he is toiling away with a cookie press while we posed for a picture. Did Grandma Anna photo-bomb us?!

In the next photo we're back at the "big house" where Uncle Jeff and Aunt Carol and the kids now live. We're posed with our presents. Notice my perm- a mistake I'm not likely to repeat! You can see that shag carpet again in the foreground- a mistake the rest of the family is not likely to repeat- not to worry, it was soon replaced!

This last group of photos stand out in my mind as the end of our childhood and the beginning of us drifting apart to begin our own adventures. Tamara, Jeremy and I have started high school- our younger siblings aren't far behind us. Here in this moment frozen in time I remember Jeremy and I singing carols together. Ellen and John are poised for presents and teenaged Tamara is barely tolerating the bunch of us and the camera. In another picture I couldn't find Jeremy and I both have arms open wide in a duet of jazz hands covering Tamara's irritated face. That photo is lost but the memory of it is not.

My Sutor Christmas memories were fond ones of fun times with my cousins! I remember going to see the lights at Holmes off 34 around the corner from our farm. I remember us catching the table cloth on fire with the red candles from the Christmas Pyramid we weren't supposed to touch. I remember the Lifesaver books and the holiday envelopes from Anderson State Bank. I remember lots of laughs and lots of cookies (some pilfered after we were cut off of sugar). Most of all I remember lots of love. So though distance and years and different mindsets have separated all of us more than I'd like and though my memories may vary from the other family members in these photos in my mind Sutor Christmas's will always be Merry and Bright.