Christmas present

My previous post was a memoir of Christmas Past.

Fifty-five years later, the Christmas experience is very different.  Most of my family of that time, the majority of whom lived within 10 miles, are no longer with us.  I now have a family of my own, who are spread over three countries and two continents.  Indeed, I now live 4,000 miles from my home town.

As a child I was part of a larger family, now the "blood family" is much smaller.  However, I now have a larger "family of friends" in many parts of England, Ireland, Spain and the US.  I am referring to "real" friends and, with respect, not the multitude of "social networking friends" that many have (I make a point of "friending" only those I know personally on such networks).

"Present" also means "a gift" and I had more than my fair share of these yesterday.  I also experienced the gift of a loving family, near and far, including an hilarious six a.m. "conference call" to our Norfolk, England family, where our wonderful granddaughters were enjoying their day and getting our day off to a good start.

Later our church family provided more love and cheer at Holy Eucharist, whilst after opening and exchanging gifts with our son and daughter-in-law we shared a wonderful Christmas dinner.

The definition of blog is, as I understand: "a Web site containing the writer's or group of writers' own experiences, observations, opinions, etc., and often having links to other Web sites."

I fear that this post is more of a journal entry than the above and sharing photographs is lacking (mainly because, unlike my daughter and daughter-in-law, I don't take many photographs), but I am working on posting more regularly.  If no one reads the posts I don't mind, I enjoy writing, albeit not too well and that's my motivation.  I enjoy reading the blogs of others and as long as they don't included incitement to intolerance and hatred, it makes us help us understand each other.