Ghosts of Christmas Past - Magnolia Arms apartment

In the in-between years (between my marriage to Keith and my marriage to Alan) I lived in an apartment in downtown Fairhope from 1996 through 2001. Here are some pictures of Christmases there...

Rosa Court Christmases, 1993-1994

In 1993 I bought a "treehouse" for the boys for Christmas. My parents were visiting, and they helped me set it up in the woods behind our house.

This was the year I slipped on the steps coming down from the kitchen and sprained my knee. (That's Casey making fun of me and my cane...) Hey, I got two weeks off from work, tho... so there's that.

This was not Christmas, but in January 1994 it snowed one night while I was at work. Christopher was at home, and he took my camera outside and took some pictures.

In December 1994, just before Christmas, I got a dog. I named him George. 

(Incidentally, Keith and I were separated in 1993, and divorced in 1994. That's why he's not in any of the pictures.)

Ghosts of Christmas Past - Rosa Court 1990-1995

In 1990 my parents bought a 3-acre wooded lot on a creek a few miles outside of Fairhope. (They were planning to retire there, but in the end they moved to Michigan instead.) There was a mobile home on the lot, so we moved into it. We lived there for 5 years, from 1990 to 1995.

Here are some pictures from our Christmases there.

My one feeble attempt at "exterior illumination"

For Christmas 1993 my mother gave me two paintings she did, from photographs. The one on the left is Casey at Mobile Bay. The one on the right is my dad and Christopher feeding the seagulls at Santa Barbara, California.

Nativity - the old and the new. There's a little bit of a story behind the old one...

We bought this little cheapie plastic nativity set from Walmart when Christopher and Casey were babies. It went with us through all the moves through all the years. And it evolved -- from just the pieces, to a "stable" made from a Peaches cassette tape crate that we had. And then later we somehow acquired a little music-box mechanism and attached it to the side of the crate. And eventually we added a plastic pair of choir-boy angels that we had on our first Christmas tree in 1979, before Christopher was born...

Thompson Hall Road, How we decorated

Some holiday decorations in the Thompson Hall Road house.

I crocheted a bunch of snowflakes for our Christmas tree.

Thompson Hall Road - What we did

In 1985 we moved back to Fairhope Alabama. Christopher was five years old and Casey was two.

We bought a used trailer in a nice trailer park for $4000 cash. We lived there for five years, from 1985 to 1990.

Here are some pictures of our Christmases in that house.

And, of course, we invited friends over to make music.

More Arkansas Christmases, 1983, 1984

More Christmases at Lape Avenue

(The picture on the top right wasn't taken at Christmas. I just added it because I think Christopher looked so cute in his red union suit.)

No house is too small or too raggedy to invite all your friends over to make music, apparently.

Ghosts of Christmas Past - 1982, Casey’s First Christmas

Ghosts of Christmas Past - 1982, Casey’s First Christmas

We called it the "caca house". However, we did have some good times there. It's the house we lived in when Casey was born, the day after Thanksgiving, 1982. Here are some pictures of that Christmas.

The ornament (top left) was made by the nurses in the hospital where Casey was born. They were making them for all the babies born from Thanksgiving through Christmas that year. Casey was the first.

Keith’s mother came to visit.

 

Right after the holidays I took Christopher and Casey and flew to California to visit my parents. It was an unplanned trip, due to the fact that I had developed gallstones and was going to have surgery. My mom didn't think we had any good surgeons in Arkansas, so she insisted that I have the same surgeon who did her gallbladder surgery a few years before. (Well, that was probably just a good excuse to get her hands on my new baby.) We stayed in California a few weeks, I had my surgery and everything went well. And Mom and Grandma Burford got to play with the grandbabies.

Ghosts of Christmas Past - 1981, Downward mobility

Ghosts of Christmas Past, 1981, Downward Mobility

In the summer of 1981 we moved into a smaller house in Searcy, Arkansas. MUCH smaller. It was a "fixer upper" and it was supposed to be a rent-to-own situation. But we didn't "fixer up"... and, as it turned out, we never "owned" either. Only after we had lived there 4 years did we find out that the house had been reported as burned down and the owner had not been paying taxes on it. The reason he did that? The house had actually been condemned, due to a sewage problem. So... yeah. The house was not really for sale, and we were apparently as dumb as a bag of rocks.

Oh, and the man who did all that -- was an elder of the church. Our church. 

Our first Christmas in this house was not even in this house. The first time the temperature dropped below freezing our water pipes burst under the house. So we evacuated to my Burford grandparents’ house in Bald Knob (just a few miles from our house), and that's where we spent the holidays. Here are some pictures from that Christmas.