You are currently browsing the category archive for the ‘holidays’ category.
Edgartown, Martha’s Vineyard
To my recollection there is only one time in my life that I spent Christmas on the Vineyard. I was probably around 5 or 6 and my mother and I went to MV to be with my godparents.
Edward and Gertrude Norris (Nana and Pop) were my godparents. They lived part of the year in their house in Oak Bluffs which is where I spent my childhood summers. The other part of the year they lived in Newark, NJ downstairs in the same house we lived in. They were the most important people in my life besides my parents. They never had children of their own and they thought of us as their family. I’m not sure of the actual connection to them except that Nana was my grandmother’s best friend when she moved to the Vineyard. When my mother graduated from high school on MV she moved to Newark, NJ to live with them and to find work.
And so one Christmas when Nana and Pop were elderly, having health problems and living year round on the Vineyard and missing us my mother decided she and I should go and spend Christmas with them. I was too young to realize this might be the last Christmas for one or both of them, all I knew was that I was going to wake up Christmas morning ON THE VINEYARD. How great would that be. The only glitch was that my dad couldn’t get off work to come with us but he insisted we go. Talk about being torn.
I seem to remember there was a dusting of snow on Christmas morning… even if there wasn’t, it’s my memory and I can enhance it a tad if need be. There were presents… one in particular I remember because I asked for it every year. A nurses kit. It was a white square box with a red cross on the side. Inside were band-aids, gauze bandages, a wooden thermomenter and a stethescope, a name tag… and the most important article.. a nurses cap. I spent the most of the morning bandaging people up whether they wanted to be or not.
All of a sudden I heard a faint knock on the front door !! I ran to open it and let out a shriek… it was my dad standing there with a big smile and a shirt box. A shirt box !! Yes indeed that’s all he had with him. No suitcase. No duffle bag. Just a shirt box with a couple of clean shirts and other essentials inside it. He liked to travel light.
It turned out to be one of the most wonderful Christmases of my childhood.
A few years ago I found this letter that my Pop had written to me for my 6th birthday. After Nana died he pretty much lived alone except for the two summer months we spent with him. I loved to listen to his stories of working on the steamships in Massachusetts and later being a bank guard in NJ. Pop couldn’t walk without the aid of a cane and even then couldn’t walk far, certainly no further than the front or back yard. Almost everyday we’d have our lunch together under a tree in the backyard and then in the evening we’d listen to the radio together. He liked programs like ‘The Shadow’ which scared the bejeebers out of me and made it hard for me to walk down the dark and seemingly endlessly long hall to my upstairs bedroom. The hardest part of my summers was saying good-bye to him… I wouldn’t cry in front of him but the tears spilled out of my eyes the moment we left the house. I still find it sad and emotional to leave the Vineyard and I’m sure those moments from long ago have a bearing on it.
I am blessed to have the memories of that one Christmas on Martha’s Vineyard and of Nana and Pop, two people who were such an important part of my life.
A smattering of pictures from 1993, 2001 and 2005, the three times I’ve been to the Christmas In Edgartown weekends.
Times Square ~ New York City
2010 is just about over… in retrospect it was a pretty good year… surprises and good things as well as the routine matters of every day living.
Here’s to 2011 and the promise of a bright new year… calendar pages yet to be written upon… dreams fulfilled. 2011 will be interesting in that the dates below are the same frontwards, backwards and upside down. Things like that amuse me.
January 1 and January 11 are 1/1/11 and 1/11/11
November 1 and November 11 are 11/1/11 and 11/11/11
Happy 2011 no matter how you look at it 
Hi, it’s me Chappy visiting gram’s blog to tell you about my Christmas morning like I did last year… you can read that post if you CLICK HERE.
As you can see I’m very patient and not touching or sniffing anything but I’ve got my eye on that red package wrapped in tissue paper. I love tissue paper.
Finally after tons of hours I get the go ahead to unwrap my present. Rip, rip…shred, shred… tossing bits of tissue paper everywhere.
Somehow I wound up under a big piece of wrapping paper. Funny, I don’t even remember that…I’m very focused when I’m opening presents. See what I got. It’s a bunch of squeaky balls attached to each other. Really fun to shake around and chew on… and that’s when the problem began. I think I chewed too hard because before we knew it I had gotten one of the balls loose and well, it could have become a choking thing for me. Gram’s upset she didn’t think of that before she bought it, but her heart was in the right place and that’s what really matters. Maybe next trip to MV we’ll find something.
Gotta say, I look pretty dashing in my red bandanna.
Here I am with mom amidst the wrappings. We look happy don’t we.
This picture below was taken at Aunt Patty’s house on the 24th…see, I’m being good and patient there too.
Hope everyone had a good Christmas, I sure did. Oh and Happy New Year to everyone too.
Chappy signing off….woof, woof
When Deb and I were on MV in October we saw this print of the Flying Horses done by artist Joan Walsh. I love the Flying Horses and Joan’s rendition definitely captures the essence of them. Believe it or not I wasn’t sure whether to purchase the print, until Deb suggested it would make a nice counted cross stitch project for me, as well as a nice Christmas gift !! She said she could chart it and it would make a nice companion piece to the Tabernacle one she charted for me in 1996. Sounded like a great idea . I immediately had selective amnesia concerning the entire conversation and so was greatly surprised on Christmas morning to open a box containing…
chart of the Flying horses…
which Deb divided into 8 sections… you can see a close up of one of the sections below…
included is chart of floss colors and names, and tah dah, floss and fabric.
Since I’m still working on the Tisbury counted cross stitch I gave her for her birthday last month, it will be awhile before I begin the Flying Horses. I already can’t wait until I finish it and can hang it next to…
The Tabernacle…
{{below is my post from 11/7/07 about it …
This is my counted cross stitch masterpiece. My daughter Deb took a photograph of the Tabernacle… blew it up to an 8×10 and charted it by hand on graph paper. There might have been computer programs for that but she didn’t have one and I’m not sure we even had a computer!. She also bought the material and my daughter Patty bought the threads and that was my Christmas gift that year. All I had to do was sew it. People always ask how long it takes to do projects so I kept track. Over the course of 3 months I sewed a total of 138 hours… every inch of the picture is counted cross stitches… even all the blue sky… and there seemed like endless amounts of that. After it was finished we took it, along with the original 5×7 photograph and had it framed. For a couple of years I just wasn’t happy with the frame though so when I had my other MV counted cross stitches framed I gave this picture a new one. I also added a little plaque at the bottom that says The Tabernacle, Oak Bluffs – Martha’s Vineyard.}}
Sew So, I’ll be keeping busy for the next several months and when I’m done and it’s framed I’ll show the finished project.
