When you live long enough, you develop a storehouse of memories along the way. Holidays are a special time for remembrance.
Christmas brings back so many memories for me and my family. Going back to childhood, the year I got my first bicycle stands out. My sister and I were opening presents Christmas morning. We finished opening the gifts under the tree. Dad asked us to pick up the paper and take it to the garage. We fiddled around. Dad then told us to do it. We dilly-dallied some more. Then Dad barked at us: Take it out to the garage!
That’s when we discovered our bikes. Oh, the joy!
Fast forward to the winter of 1996. My wife and I had moved to Amarillo less than two years earlier.
It was on Dec. 22 of that year, 18 years ago today, that we closed on a house we had built — or, more to the point, that the contractor built for us.
We found a lot in southwest Amarillo. Development on the street had just begun. Ours was the fourth house on the street. Work began in mid-October. The weather had been mild and dry for the next two months.
Presto! The house was done. We signed the papers. We’d made arrangements with a local moving company to haul our worldly belongings out of storage and into our new digs.
This all happened in the span of one full day, Dec. 23.
Two days before Christmas. Our house was done. The furnishings were in the designated rooms. But boxes were strewn everywhere.
We had a few Christmas packages. Our sons would be coming over.
A couple of days before we closed on our house, my wife and I went to the storage unit where our stuff was kept and she looked around and announced to our belongings, “OK guys, just a few more days and you’ll be coming out of here.”
We didn’t get the house decorated for Christmas that year, quite obviously. But we did have a tree. It was a 3-foot-tall Norfolk pine that we had brought with us from Beaumont in early 1995. My wife rummaged through some boxes and found a string of lights.
We wrapped them around the tree, placed the packages under it, welcomed our sons over to our still-box-strewn house — and had the most wonderful Christmas imaginable as we rediscovered belongings that had been in storage. Some of it, frankly, I had forgotten we even owned.
Yes, Christmas is a time for memories. I wouldn’t recommend moving into a new home so close to the holiday. Then again, I wouldn’t trade the memory of that experience for anything in the world.