Christmas Memories

Christmas is one of my favorite times of year. I thought it would be fun to share some of my favorite memories.

As many of you know, I grew up on the same farm as my grandparents. I loved going over to my grandparents house, but never as much as when they were making lefsa and flatbread for Christmas. My grandma would roll, what seemed like thousands of pieces of lefsa, while my grandfather put the lefsa on the iron. My brothers and I would just wait for them to tell us that we could have a piece. To this day, no matter how hard we try to make it, there will never be lefsa as good as theirs.

When I was younger, we would always celebrate Christmas on Christmas eve. As my grandma and mom were cooking the Christmas meal, my grandpa, dad, and brothers would be finishing up the chores down in the barn. As soon as they showered and cleaned up, we would have our Christmas dinner, which always included, Norwegian meatballs, Lutefisk, riced potatoes and gravy. We would be sitting at the table eating and each year there seemed to be a knock on the door. My brothers and I would run to the door and find new sleds sitting outside waiting for us. My grandparents and parents always said that Santa must have needed to lighten his load and decided to drop off the sleds.

After we would open presents, we loaded up the van and went to Christmas Candlelight services. I loved when we lit up the whole church with the candles and sang "Silent Night!"

The next day, we would usually take our new sleds, go outside and go behind our barn where we had a great sledding hill. We would play cops and robbers with our sleds. One person would start at the way top of the hill, they were the robber. The other two would start off to the sides and try to stop the robber before they got to the bottom of the hill. We had a blast. We usually got our parents in the game a time or two.

One of my best Christmas memories however came as a grew older. When I was a junior in high school, my dad was in the hospital just recovering from surgery to remove melanoma skin cancer. The doctors told us that he would not be able to come for Christmas. We were lucky enough that he was able to come home from the hospital. It didn't matter what we got for Christmas presents just being with family and having him home from the hospital was all any of us needed for Christmas.

I pray that this Christmas, you will all be blessed with your family and great memories.