Christmas

Dear family and friends, today's chapter of the Ralph Family Photo Album captures some thoughts and pictures of Christmas's past. Thank you for encouraging  my "sheltering at home" project and for your patience in letting me share some of our family history and stories these past months. I'm looking forward to sending more short stories in the coming year and I greatly enjoy hearing back from each of you!   Take care and Merry Christmas!

Photo #1 - Billy and Jimmy, Christmas circa 1948

Photo #2 - The Ralph Family, Early 1950's Christmas

Photo #3 - Debi, Christmas 1957

Photo #4 - Billy and Jimmy, Christmas 1944

A Christmas Letter 2020

Tomorrow will be Christmas number seventy eight and eight decades of Christmas’s have folded into a blur of images and fading family memories. Some of my very earliest Christmas memories are spending Christmas Eve with our neighbor’s the Lorentzen’s and in- person visits by Santa, although Jimmy and I were suspicious that the jolly old elf resembled Ed Lorentzen (who had excused himself earlier in the evening to “see a man about a horse”). 

Christmas morning was agonizing for us two little boys because we had to wait until after breakfast to be led into the living room to see what gifts had been delivered overnight and if Santa actually ate the cookies and milk left for him. In the early post war years many of our gifts were handmade by dad including a wooden slide and the trains and metal toys wouldn’t be available for several more years. 

After a Christmas Day visit with Grandpa Ralph on Lake Chabot Road we usually went to Grandma and Grandpa Swinnock’s home (mom’s folks) in San Leandro for Christmas dinner with mom’s family. Jimmy and I looked forward to visiting with the cousins of our age, Randy and Sue, Sandra and Kennard and Gary and Kathleen several of whom we usually saw only once a year. I have memories of homemade cookies and cream soda, grandma’s toy box, and playing with metal soldiers on the hardwood floor. 

After dinner the “guys” would retire to a smoky bedroom for a evening of playing cards while the “ladies” took advantage of the rare opportunity to visit. Dad wasn’t a card player so he would take Jimmy, me and several of our cousins to one of the theaters on Broadway in downtown Oakland to see a movie. I can recall being highly impressed with the realism of Destination Moon and a few years later being terrified by the Gene Barry version of War of the Worlds.

It was only natural that Christmas traditions evolved as the years went by, we got older and had our own families, all to soon grandparents and parents passed, cousins went separate ways and lives changed for ever. Relying on memories, but without visit’s, hugs or shared meals, Christmas number seventy eight will be different than all others as we shelter in place and reach out across the country with phone calls, emails and video chats.

Best wishes to our extended family and dear friends as you create Christmas traditions and make your own memories.