Santa Pictures – Part 2

Last week, I posted some of my photos with Santa. This week, I’ll show you the rest of them.

This was taken when I was five. I’m wearing the same dress I wore on the first day of kindergarten. I loved Santa, but I don’t look thrilled here. I assume my brother, Ron, has a separate picture. He would have been two. (I gave him all his photos years ago.) 

My mother loved bonnets on me. I hated them. Here, I'm wearing another one.

The next one was also taken when I was five. Apparently, I liked this Santa better, or maybe my cousin David (six-years-old) gave me more courage. (This is a better-looking Santa than the other one.)

Note the scrape on my leg. I was painfully clumsy as a kid and fell down a lot.

At age six, I look happier with the guy in the red suit. (He looks like the same one with me in the first five-year-old photo.) I still don’t know where my brother was.

When I was seven, I finally took a picture with my brother (aged four).

This one is bittersweet. By the next Christmas, my father was dead. (He passed away the following February.) This is the last real Christmas of our childhood.

I took Kim to see Santa when she was little (as well as the Easter Bunny a couple of times). I have the photos to prove it. As I recall, she generally liked Santa and looks happy in her photos.

These pictures represent the best times during my childhood. Do you have any of these? How do you feel about them?

Let it Go

My brother and I are cursed with incredible memories. We never forget anything. In my case, this ‘gift’ makes it very hard to get rid of ‘stuff.’

We just re-carpeted the whole house and are now in the process of putting everything back. We decided to weed out a lot of the things we really don’t need anymore. But…

What about the items friends made for us? We may not have used them—yet, but we might someday. And after all, thought and effort went into them.

What about all the old photos? We’ve scanned a lot of them, but we have nearly fifty albums plus two plastic file cabinets full. Somehow, we became the repository for all the family photos from both sides of the family. We’ll keep the ones commemorating special occasions, like weddings, but what about the others?

We uncovered grandparents’ and parents’ mini-albums of the formal photos from our wedding and Kim’s. What about those? We have the large one of ours, and Kim has her big one. What about the rest?

There are also quite a few formal portraits of other family members with no children. They are all gone now, so what do we do with those pictures?

I love the song from Frozen, “Let it Go.” I wish I could. All these treasures have sentimental attachments. Some were wedding gifts. Others were presents for our twenty-fifth anniversary. I still remember the people who gave them to us. I smile each time I recall these old friends and family members, and I don’t want to part with their gifts.

Fortunately, we have a large house, but someday, we may want to downsize. What then?

We are taking a little time as we put things back in place to evaluate what to keep, what to toss, and what to give away. I’m sure we’ll still end up with far too much stuff!

I need to start sorting through my shoes. Does anyone wear size five wide? And I really intend to read all these books—someday.

Time to get back to it. Does anyone have any suggestions as to how to get this done quickly? Never mind. I probably won’t take the advice anyway.