Christmas Celebrations in 1979

One seldom stops to think about whether the things in your life are typical or unusal. Our celebration of Christmas in 1979 was a case in point. We sometimes went to Boston for the holidays and assumed that we would continue to do that from time to time. However, life's changes have a way of interfering with plans! That year, we drove up to Boston as soon as our children finished their school. We enjoyed Baba's cooking, of course, and during the visit we always had three things to do in the following sequence. First we opened the gifts early on Christmas morning. After resting a bit, we then had dinner with Uncle Fran and Aunt Dot. Finally, beginning the day after Christmas, we would drive about the surrounding area to visit other relatives. I will show you these three in sequence as they took place in 1979. In this blog I will show you the opening-gifts part. (The last picture below can give you an indication of how tired our kids were after opening gifts at the crack of dawn!) In the next two blogs, I will show you pictures of the other two parts of the holiday. In 1982, Janice's father passed away and her grandmother became bed-ridden. It followed that our assumptions about future Christmas celebrations changed. Of course, life changes constantly, sometimes in ways which are unexpected, and we must be ready to adapt and accept what comes next!