Happy Holidays, the best of the best.

Welcome back to another blog hop, with #OpenBook. Here’s this week’s prompt.

Don’t forget to click the link to see what everyone else has to say on this week’s subject. It’s at the end of my post.

Which is your favourite holiday and why?

My apologies in advance for the shorter-than-usual post. I’m knee deep in what used to be called NaNoWriMo.

Since I retired, every day’s a holiday. Apart from that, my favourite is and has always been Christmas. It has so many memories.

Here’s a selection of the ones that stick in my mind.

One of my first memories of Christmas was in 1962, when I was four. I’d just started school in rural Devon the previous September. It snowed on Boxing Day and kept on snowing. There was still snow on the ground in March. Through it all, my school stayed open. I can remember walking through drifts higher than my parents on the journey each day.

A Christmas spent on a ship was always special. As we were all away from home and family, we went out of our way to make it a good day, as much as we could around watch-keeping and other duties. In 1977, on a ship in the mid-Atlantic, Christmas Day passed with us in the teeth of a hurricane. I spent most of the day with the rest of the crew, trying to secure cargo that had broken loose, all by the light from a swinging lamp.

Then there was one memorable Christmas, while I still lived with my parents, where one of my father’s old Navy friends turned up before we ate Christmas lunch. He said he had only popped in to wish us a happy Christmas. We gave him a drink and a mince pie, he stayed till two in the morning, drinking, eating and reminiscing.

Or Christmas 1998, when the pilotage service had been suspended for a week due to bad weather, it lifted on December 23rd. To clear the backlog, we all worked solidly through the holiday, one four or five-hour job, eight hours off, then another.

Other memorable Christmases were the ones where we lost a lot of our children’s presents, or had the flu and failed to cook our turkey. One year, we even managed to thank people for things that we hadn’t received. And water a non-rooted tree so much that it overflowed.

Through it all, it still remains my favourite time of year. Now I love to share it with grandchildren, who still see it as a time of magic and wonder.

My daughter, living in Australia, spends her Christmases on the beach. I have no words for that.

What do you think about this week’s subject?

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I’ll be back with another post on Thursday, see you then. Meanwhile, have a great week.

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