Family memories

I will try to remember what I wrote yesterday ; for some reason, we lost our comcast for a day or so and they deleted the blog. I spent the day with my younger sister and we talked about our favorite Christmas memories when growing up. She is 13 years younger than I am so we have very different memories. Our other sister was in between us. One of my favorite Christmases was the year I was eight and received a miniature Singer sewing machine...I made lots of doll clothes with that (and I still have it!) The next Christmas my middle sister was 4 months old and Daddy was drafted into World War II, so we moved next door and lived with my grandparents for nearly two years until Daddy came back in the fall of 1945. While he was gone we had that Christmas at Grandma and Grandpa's, and both of us girls had scarlet fever for three months from January until the end of March. This was the bad kind, not the scarlatina of now. While Daddy was gone, we wrote to him and he sent lots of letters and drawings of where he was, and occasionally boxes of things he purchased for us. I still have a beautiful blue glass vase he sent from Paris (he painted our initials on each vase--sister, mama and me). Daddy also built me a jewelry box from packing crates and sent that. All our letters were made into small versions called "V mail" and that was cost less to mail...I still have many of the V mails he sent to me. Much of this was at Christmas that lonely one he was gone but other things throughout the years. The year he came home, the Christmas of 1945, I got my first bicycle! Two Christmases later, my younger sister was born that November, making that very special. The year I was 14, we got our first PINE tree! Up until then we had always cut a cedar tree from the fields behind our place and so it meant so much to have a bought tree like "everyone else".
My youngest sister remembers (me, too) how we would cut bunches of "buck bushes", milkweed pods, and other dried weeds and flowers and Mama would paint them gold and silver and place them in vases and buckets on the porches and in the house. Lots of wonderful memories and Christmas past with my sisters will never be forgotten. Luke 1:46, Mary says "My soul glorifies the Lord..." Oh, indeed it does!