Friday, December 10, 1999

Some days, it just hits me...

Today, I was reading my mom's blog about making our Christmas card, and she mentioned my grandfather, "papa", who passed away in 2006. He was the most amazing person I've ever known...I usually saw him on holidays, like Christmas and Easter. Christmas at Nanny and Papa's was the best growing up, well....Thanksgiving was hard to beat. Being between the 2 holidays, I think it a good time to reminisce...

At Thanksgiving, the entire family would go up to a cabin in Wawona, Yosemite. That's where I learned the importance of the Elliott family tradition of making pomegranate jelly--actually, the importance is really just that it gets made :) haha....all the kids would play around, and if we were lucky it would snow and we could make home-made snow cones. Papa was sure that no body broke the initiation of poker. Everyone had to earn their right to sit at the table on Thanksgiving to play poker with the adults...us kids could be seat warmers till we earned a seat--meaning we got to play while someone was in the bathroom.

But christmas was particularly nice. The tree was always so beautifully decorated, and having presents for the whole family made it look like we had billions of presents!! Papa would always have a drink in his hand at christmas...tom and jerrys are another tradition--papa always made the drinks strong, you know, sharing the christmas cheer. As I grew up, I sat closer and closer to papa, he would teach me things I never thought about, like the price of bees. (These conversations were very different from the ones we would have at our cabin in Huntington Lake which usually involved some horror story about firearms or weapons or fires to teach my sister and I not to play with these types of things). Santa Claus himself always came to Christmas...I'm pretty sure it was Papa sometimes, but I think my godfather dressed up once too...I'll have to ask my dad about that...then all the adults would have cigars while all the kids played with everything they had just unwrapped.

Papa's always around, he probably plays tricks on me hah, but today was one of those days when it just hit me, out of the blue...I miss Papa

Here's my dashing dad and papa:

1 comment:

  1. What a beatiful post, sweetheart. You are quite a writer. And I love the pic. Dashing indeed. Here's to more Christmas cheer and I'm sure Poppa will be there celebrating with the best of us.

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