For many years, as summer was ending, we packed up our Turtle (truck/camper) and took off into the desert wilderness for five to seven months. We only returned to our home on Whidbey Island when spring was in the air, and the winter months were nearing an end. It was then time to hop onto our bicycles and start training for the STP, the 204 mile Seattle to Portland bike ride that we did every July with Jules.
Dan and I often try to remember where we were and how we celebrated each of our Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays. We just can’t sort them out anymore. This year it is our tenth year celebrating these wonderful holidays together, so we decided to memorialize each of our previous nine years.
We did this for Thanksgiving in our November blog post, Thanksgiving together for ten years.
Today on our 10th Christmas, we are reminiscing together and sharing our memories of our Christmases past. We are laughing and crying as we remember each special Christmas....wonderfully sweet memories, but days that can never be lived again, except in our memories.
2011: Our first Christmas together and the only one that we spent at our Whidbey Island home in Washington. And boy, it was a wonderfully fun, family celebration that lasted for days and days!
It started when Marina and Stella helped to decorate our Christmas tree.
Ian and Adam chose which Snow Village pieces we would display and arranged them just perfectly.
In mid December Tonia stayed with us for a week. We showed her both the quaint spots and beautiful sights all around Whidbey Island. We also spent time just hanging out together. Tonia and I made jewelry together. and she showed me how to oven roast brussel sprouts.
They were delicious! Good thing that Dan didn’t seem to like even the best ever roasted brussel sprouts since there were hardly enough for Tonia and me. We gobbled up them all up without Dan’s help!
We had a lovely time. It was sad to say goodbye to Tonia.
Here she is on our trip to Deception Pass:
Rachelle was born a few days before Christmas. She was my best Christmas present ever!
The day before this 2011 Christmas Ryan, Rachelle, Ida, and Alden visited us, and we celebrated her birthday and Christmas.
In this picture dear little Ida is taking care of both her baby, “Baby Ronan,” and her baby brother, Alden. (“Baby Ronan” had been Rachelle’s baby doll when she was a child.)
Our sweet granddaughters, Marina and Stella, visited us on Christmas Eve and opened the presents in their stockings that had been hung with care...... The stockings are about as big as they are!
We had a wonderful Christmas Day, just the two of us together. Our very first Christmas and it was perfect!
Right after Christmas Emily, Sean, Soren, and little baby Sebastian arrived all the way from Georgia. So we got to celebrate Christmas with them too!
As an extra treat, we decided to surprise Sean (who has an early January birthday) and invited Jules, Jessica, Ian, and Adam. On New Year’s Eve, we all celebrated Sean’s birthday!
None of the grandchildren let the cat out of the bag, and Sean was truly surprised. It was a very special way to bring in 2012.
2012:
In the fall we left for our second road trip. During the Christmas season we were cycling and hiking in Mesa, Arizona and camping at Usery Mountain Regional Park.
We didn’t see Santa Claus with eight tiny reindeer pulling his sleigh filled with presents, but we did see this on Christmas morning....a very special Christmas surprise!
And on New Year’s Eve we danced the night away at the Paragon Dance Center in Phoenix!
2013:
By Christmas we had camped and hiked all the way from Whidbey Island to the Florida Keys and back again to Texas. We had spent much of November in Georgia with Sean, Emily, Soren, and Sebastian. Then we stopped off for a week in early December to stay in a RV Park and explore New Orleans.
But on Christmas we were at Big Bend National Park on the Rio Grande in southern Texas.
This was the first time we heard about dispersed camping (camping out in the middle of nowhere, without power, water, or a toilet, and no one else anywhere around for miles). We camped in our very first dispersed camping spot. It was love at first sight!
This is how we’ve camped ever since (with very rare exceptions).
We toasted each other and our family on Christmas Day.
A full-course Christmas dinner in our little home in the desert:
And a desert of homemade pumpkin pie topped with lots and lots of ice cream served in bed....happy Dan!
We danced together in Phoenix at the Paragon Dance Center until midnight on New Year’s Eve.....welcome 2014!
Kathy and Bill met us for a few days before Christmas at Big Bend National Park. We had a wonderful time with them and hiked together every day.
Kathy and Bill left Big Bend so they could celebrate Christmas at home with Tonia. We camped out in the middle of nowhere....a perfect spot for us to enjoy the desert and each other on Christmas!
Our Turtle is nestled in the center of this picture. This was the view from our little home on Christmas eve...spectacular in every direction!
On New Year’s Eve morning we woke up to snow on the ground. It felt like Christmas in the North Pole, except for all the cactus in the desert.
Look what we made on our New Year’s Day hike in the desert!
2015:
On our road trip in the fall we discovered General Patton’s historic World War II Desert Training Centers. The desert training centers intrigued us, and we spent weeks researching and exploring several of the deserted training camps located in southern California.
During Christmas we camped at the site of the World War II Granite Mountain Desert Training Center.
We hiked everyday and crisscrossed the desert where these young boys were trained in desert warfare so they could fight and survive in the battlefields of North Africa. We celebrated these boys and mourned for the boys who fought and died on those distant deserts.
We danced in the sand of this desert training camp and celebrated Christmas and the new year together in this desert where once many young soldiers had been far from home at Christmas time, 78 years ago. And we thought about all these boys with sadness, but also with love and gratitude in our hearts.
2016:
After an amazing fall of camping and hiking through the National Grasslands clear from North Dakota to Texas, we ended up camping and hiking in the Buckskin Mountains in Arizona for Christmas.
We wished all our friends and family a very “ Cholla”ful Holiday!
We celebrated the New Year’s Eve at the 29 Palms RV Resort and danced the night away!
Santa brought us two very special Christmas gifts this year.
The first gift was our grandson, Ian, who was 13 years old in 2017. This trip with us was our Bar Mitzvah present to him. He flew into Las Vegas where we picked him up and drove to the Mojave National Preserve in California to set up camp.
Every evening Ian lit the candles for Hanukkah. During the day we hiked and showed Ian 100+ year old mining camps, and then sat out together in our lovely desert.
The second present that Santa brought us was my son, Owen. On December 23rd he left his home in Spokane, Washington in a raging blizzard that followed him all the way through Nevada. Owen drove straight through and arrived in the Mojave Desert on Christmas Eve. What a joyous present!
This was the first time that we had been able to show any of our family how we live for months at a time out in the middle of the desert. Both Ian and Owen thoroughly enjoyed their days with us exploring the old miners' cabins and looking down the ancient decrepit mine shafts where these long gone miners tried to find their fortune or at least make a living.
This was a Christmas in the desert that we will never forget.
2018:
Our first Christmas at Nuestra Casa! We set up our Snow Village in our new home in Leisure World.
We were good last year, so Santa Claus left us lots of presents on Christmas morning.
And we held each other and danced before sitting down to our scrumptious Christmas Dinner.
The very next day Sean, Emily, Soren, and Sebastian arrived for a family reunion and to celebrate Christmas in our new home.
Jules, Ian, and Adam arrived to join our family and we spent every day visiting all the places that Dan had taken his children with Mom and Dad for the many years that Emily and Jules’ grandparents had lived in Leisure World.
We ate at the Rendezvous Cafe, the Diner, the Organ Stop Pizza, and of course Serrano’s. We ordered AND ATE eight pies from the Village Inn.
One day we went to the Phoenix Zoo so the kids could run around. Sebastian, Soren and I rode a camel. It was the first time any of us had ridden a camel and we had lots of fun!
We hiked several days in the mountains surrounding Mesa. Dan had undergone open heart surgery just three months before, and it was our first hikes since his surgery. Sean and Ian (quietly and without being asked) stayed VERY close to him on the steep parts of the trail and made sure that Dan didn’t fall.
Our family picture in the Wind Cave:
The weather was unseasonably cold, but every afternoon Ian, Adam, Soren, Sebastian, Grandma, and Grandpa went swimming and played in the pool together!
Boy did we have fun swimming with our grandsons!
We were fortunate to celebrate Christmas and the New Year with so much of our family at Nuestra Casa. And now we can carry on all the Graybill Leisure World traditions with our grandchildren too!
As Dad Graybill always said when it was time to say goodbye to the family he loved, “I wish you had never come.” That’s how we felt when it was time for everyone to leave....it hurt so bad to say goodbye.
2019:
Santa came early this year....and delivered the Quail, our teardrop trailer!
We set up our Snow Village in both our living room and bedroom. We felt like children again as I arranged all the homes and people just so, and Dan festively lit up both our villages.
Since Adam played in a tag football team that had made it to the playoffs being held south of Phoenix, we had a wonderfully unexpected visit from our grandson in the middle of December.
We enjoyed watching his games, swimming, and walking on the paths around all the ponds. We also kept up the Graybill tradition, and took Adam to Serrano’s for dinner and desert.
OK, we have to be honest and admit that Dan and I also devoured our own scrumptious desert which was identical to Adam’s....deliciously decadent!
On Christmas Eve Dan and I watched the hilarious Steve Martin Christmas movie, “Mixed Nuts.” When my children were young, I had watched it countless times on Christmas Eve with my children while we all ate countless Christmas cookies that we had made together.
But Dan had never seen this movie. We both laughed and cried together. One can never see this classic too many times, although I’m not sure that Dan would call it a true Christmas classic.
Christmas morning we opened our present from Santa....
And more presents...
The day after Christmas Soren and Sebastian arrived and we started celebrating Christmas all over again!
We played, swam, and laughed together. Then we made popcorn and watched a Western Cowboy movie every evening.
We traveled north to Camp Verde and Jerome and spent several days exploring historical sites in the area.
As Soren said years ago when he was just a little boy and we took him camping at Deception Pass, “Let’s take a family picture!"
So once again, we took a family picture....on our New Year’s Eve hike. What a way to bring in 2020, with two of our wonderful grandchildren!
We have had many adventures and discovered wonderful things in our country that we hadn’t even known existed, but what we treasure the most is the love we have for each other, our children, our grandchildren, and our family.
This love is our gift to each other and those we love on Christmas Eve in the year 2020.
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