Happy holidays

Members of Salon's Table Talk community share their best Christmas memories this week. What's yours?

Published December 5, 2008 7:05PM (EST)

Imagination

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Heidi Lynn - 06:53 am Pacific Time - Dec 2, 2008 - #2123 of 2165

What was your best holiday (any holiday) ever?

la maga - 08:27 am Pacific Time - Dec 2, 2008 - #2124 of 2165

I had a lot of good ones as a kid, but as an adult, I'd have to say the year I was broke and living in Portland with my (now ex) boyfriend. Neither of us could afford to miss work and go home for Christmas, so we decided to make the best of what we had there and throw our own. We decided that we could each afford to spend ten dollars on gifts, and so we went to the thrift stores and shopped for each other -- I got him a hard-bound Dickens anthology, a set of colored pencils and a compass. He got me two of those balsam airplane kits, a funky 1970s coffee percolator that lit up and a book about knot-tying. I can't believe I remember that! Anyway, I went to the grocers and asked the butcher to give me some butcher paper, and we decorated it ourselves and used it for wrapping (he was a comic artist, so the results of this were particularly fun).

We walked together down to the tree lot on Christmas Eve and convinced them to give us one of their last stragglers, a goofy little crooked blue spruce with a top that pointed sideways. We strung popcorn and cranberries for it and made a tinfoil star for the top. We put our meager little packages beneath it and oohed and aahed over how beautiful it looked. It did, too. Then we got a phone call from a good friend who'd been planning to go out of town for the holiday but had ended up having to work. She and her boyfriend came over, carting along all the food they were planning on taking out of town, and when they got there mentioned that another one of our friends was also stuck in town. Before we knew it, we had ten people crammed in our tiny apartment, and everyone had brought food and booze and cheap beer, and we stayed up and listened to records and drunkenly sang a few carols that no one could remember all the words to and watched the sunrise next to the water tower from the fire escape.

VickieMcKay - 08:51 am Pacific Time - Dec 2, 2008 - #2127 of 2165

Probably around 7th grade. For some reason, I remember how proud I was of my shiny silver timex. I had my own camera and still have the picture of all my presents, peach bathrobe, lifesavers sweet storybook, and my shiny watch.

Dale - 01:52 pm Pacific Time - Dec 2, 2008 - #2128 of 2165

Not one specific day, but a general childhood reminiscence. We used to go over to my mother's close friends' house every Christmas day. We weren't Christian, so Santa never stopped at our house, but he DID leave us a gift or two under our "auntie and uncle's" tree. And then we had ham sandwiches and my mom and "auntie" competed to see who could produce the greater variety of delicious cookies (and I'm talking two or three dozen KINDS, each. It was awesome).

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