Merry Christmas and Christmas Memories

Everybody seems to be putting up Christmas posts, and since I know a lot of you will soon be too busy to be looking at blogs until later next week, I want to wish all my readers Merry Christmas as well. I'm planning a 12 Days of Christmas series that will start on Christmas Day, as long as I get enough of a head start on photographing it. So for this post, I was inspired to post a Christmas past post of myself, since Tam has her own series going, although the pictures are currently from her friend's Christmases.

This is me on Christmas Day, 1972, at the age of four. In the photo, you can see my Dressy Bessy doll to my right, although she looks kind of funny, with her legs tucked underneath her. I also got the Fisher-Price garage, and the box to the left of Bessy contains what I believe was a scale. It had numbers of different weights, and you could balance the scale by putting, for example, 5 on one side, and 3 and 2 on the other.

I have a picture of Dressy Bessy on my Pinterest, from an eBay auction that must have ended ages ago. There were other styles of Bessy made over the years, but this one looks like the one that I had.

Here's a picture of my mom from the same day, holding my youngest sister on her lap, and holding my middle sister's Dapper Dan which she received that year, in front of my middle sister. 

Dressy Bessy and Dapper Dan were designed to help kids learn how to button a button, tie a bow, buckle a buckle, snap a snap, and use a zipper. They were made by Playskool, which made a lot of cool toys for younger kids back in the day. I think this was the same Christmas that we received a set of Playskool wooden blocks in different shapes and colors. I remember having hours of fun building things with those blocks.

The pictures are blurry, because I screen saved these from the Super 8 videos that my father took. There's quite a bit of video out there from when we were young, not so much from when we were older. And of course I, as the eldest child, got the lion's share of screen time. I did, after all, have two whole years to myself before my middle sister was born, and then there were another two before my youngest.

And about that afghan on the couch behind my mother, I also have a picture of a similar afghan on my Pinterest, with the caption "Almost everyone had an afghan like this." We certainly did, made by my mother herself.

Merry Christmas to all of you!