Christmas memories from my kidhood...

I grew up in a big old barn of a two story house. Pretty early on my parents hit upon the idea of putting one of the lower branches trimmed from the bottom of our live tree (from Uncle Homer's Christmas tree farm) at the top of the stairs (there was a bit of a "wide-spot" in the hallway there). We would put a few small ornaments on it and called it the "upstairs tree". Then Santa would leave each of the kids a present under that tree (usually a book but sometimes a small toy) that we could get whenever we got up. But we had to take it back to our bedroom. We couldn't go down stairs until after our parents got up. But the "token" present gave us something to do so that we could let them sleep in.

After unwrapping our presents and maybe taking a break for breakfast we all had to get dressed in new Christmas clothes and pile into the car to go to Grandma Fry's house (Grandpa Fry lived there too but it was still Grandma's house). Command performance, attendance required. You HAD to go to Grandma's on Christmas Day. Of course, by the time I can start to remember some of my older cousins were already bringing "significant others" if not spouses. With my grandparents, their 8 kids and their spouses and the 22 first cousins and half a dozen or so of their spouses it soon became a spectacle to see nearly 50 people in essentially two rooms of Grandma's house. Their were a couple of cooks in the kitchen but no one in the bedroom (that was reserved for the coats on the bed - usually a pretty impressive pile). That left the "dining" room and the "front" room. Basically everybody had to find a seat and you were stuck there (the origin of the phrase 'move your feet, lose your seat').

Of course, a few of the youngest cousins (Linda, Cindy, Dave, Mike, myself, Ken and Mel) would escape upstairs. But there wasn't any food up there :-) It did get us out from under foot and let us move about a bit. Downstairs was definitely not "kid" friendly.

Grandma always had a present for every grandkid. Usually Lorraine got recruited to go out to Grandma's house a week or so before Christmas to help wrap.

And the big decision of the day was who was to host the family New Year's Eve party. Usually there were at least a couple of volunteers but all of the aunts had to get together and decide whose got the "privilege" of hosting the whole crowd a week later. There wasn't any set rotation but it seemed to rotate fairly equally. Of course, the fact that Carl and Margaret lived 60 miles away and the rest lived within 15 miles of Logansport made it possible to get to whoever's house was the designated party spot.