Author: Staff

By Mary Sicilia Felida When I was eight, my parents began running a boarding house in Duluth, Minn. It was my mom, dad, me and nine “guys” for Christmas Eve and every other eve for that matter. Mostly they were Great Lakes shore men or steelworkers — all of them were immigrants or first generation […]

Sharon Crisp Mount Vista Neighborhood My Christmas memory doesn’t include gifts, good food or visits with cousins, although they did likely occur. I remember Christmas Eve when I was four. World War II was in progress. I was in the car with my Dad returning home from some errand I don’t remember. It was pouring […]

Wanita L. Gray Smith Tower I didn’t know we were poor when I was little because Mama never told me we were. We lived on welfare and Mama’s dressmaking. I always had 10 cents for a Saturday movie on Clark Street in Chicago, where I grew up with Lincoln Park for my playground. I didn’t […]

Helena (Hotvedt) Snyder Washougal When my parents and older brother were released from Japanese concentration camps during World War II, they were sent to Australia, where I was born in 1946. They waited for visas to come to the USA, and when I was 4 we entered via New York. We finally settled in Glendale, […]

Marlice A. Bryant Truman neighborhood Having been invited to a gingerbread house decorating party, I decided to put together a sweet little 6-by-6-inch house in the 20 minutes before running an errand. The directions seemed simple: “Stand up walls and glue together with royal icing. Attach peaked roof and hold for one minute until icing […]

Roberta Marchand The Heights neighborhood My husband and I told our children that sometimes Santa came to visit good little children in person when they were very good. It was 1962 and we had three little ones ages 6, 4 and 2 years. We were waiting until we could leave our own home to go […]

Carol Monroe Battle Ground On Thanksgiving day, we always got a 20-dollar bill from Grandma to purchase our tickets at the Frederick & Nelson department store in Seattle for breakfast with Santa and to have our pictures taken. The day after Thanksgiving, the kids in our family always made out our Christmas lists and sent […]

Suzy Correa Prune Hill – Columbia Summit I wanted to have a picture-perfect American holiday the first year my soon-to-be German son-in-law came to our house for Christmas. But I’ve never claimed to be a good cook, so I was understandably nervous. Honestly, I thought the bird was defrosted when I put it in the […]

Jennifer Tyger Camas According to answers.yahoo.com, perfect means something that is as good as it could possibly be. Every year my husband and I ask each other if this is the year we get an artificial tree. After all, they are perfect. And each year our son, daughter-in-law and granddaughters ask us to go out […]

Tawnya Melton Mueller Battle Ground Many years ago when my mom started a new Christmas Eve tradition, I don’t think she realized the forever gift she was giving to our family. It was always tradition that once it was dark enough to turn on the red lights on the house, it was time to gather […]