Steve’s Genealogy Blog

O Fruitcake, how I long to set you free,
And see you where you surely ought to be,

My earliest memory of attending a live performance at Christmastime was when I was in graduate school in Oregon. I attended a sing-along Messiah concert with a group of my fellow students. I wasn’t familiar with much of the Messiah, so I really didn’t sing along. My friends sang with gusto and were a bit disappointed […]

In particular, I am a strong supporter of a drop-in center for homeless women in Oakland, California called A Friendly Place and its companion overnight facility for homeless women called A Friendly Manor.

One thing my family did not do was travel.
During the summers, a long trip was the 150 miles or so from Albany, New York to Worcester, Massachusetts via Route 20 (before the Massachusetts Turnpike was completed). During the winter, we barely traveled at all and, even then, our travel was restricted to the Albany area.
One trip during the […]

I lived at home for the first 19 years of my life and, although I must have received hundreds of Christmas presents in that time, I remember very few.

At these gatherings, one of the favorite pastimes of the adults was cribbage. Being the only children at these events, my sisters and I were expected to amuse ourselves as the adults played cards.

Mom rarely baked cookies. At the holidays, there really was no need. Everyone seemed to give us cookies at Christmastime, so there was never a cookie shortage in our house.

Sister Marie DeLourdes gave our first-grade class an unusual assignment in December 1961.
Each student was to bring in one wire clothes hanger and a supply of tissue paper in whatever colors we wanted.
My mother looked at the list, went to the front hall closet, chose a wire hanger, and dug out a bag of tissue […]

My sisters and I poured over the Sears Catalog and the Montgomery Ward Catalog and whatever other holiday shopping catalogs we had in the house. In the 1960s, most of the large department stores distributed huge catalogs with pictures of all their wares and, it seemed, we had every single catalog available.
Of course, for my sisters and for me, […]

My sisters and I stood, just inside the front door of the house, watching our father as he hung the decorations on the front porch.
The wind gusted and tried to snatch away the aluminum garland Dad was trying to affix to the eaves of the porch. The storm door shook from the force of the wind. We […]