A Different Holiday

​CHRISTMAS 2018
It’s December 20, 2018. Yesterday I celebrated my 85th. birthday—actually, we celebrated my BD on the night before with Margo, Butch, Jan, Joss, and Pat at El Carpaccio Restaurant on Hilton Head. See photo above.
         Normally at this time we are anticipating the entire family headed for Hilton Head to celebrate Christmas with each other and with Pat and me. This year, we decided to visit Ann and Dr. Buell Miller at their house on Long Island in the Bahamas. Ann Foskett Miller is a long-time friend who lost her husband, Roger, to Alzheimer’s a few years ago. She met Dr. Miller on the internet and they fell in love and married. Buell had a house at the Stella Maris Resort in the Bahamas and they have invited us a number of times to visit them there. We fly there on December 23rd.
         This year, for the first time ever since our first year of marriage, Pat and I will celebrate Christmas and New Year’s Eve outside of the USA. Sixty-one year’s ago (December 1957) Pat and I had just married in Atlanta on November 30th., honeymooned in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany, and moved into an apartment in Fresnes en Woevre, France. We had a Christmas tree in that small apartment and remember it was chilly the day before Christmas and we drove to Verdun to get fuel for our house-heater—a device we learned later was dangerous because of fire and carbon-monoxide poisoning. I believe it was called ‘Aladdin’s Space Heater’ and used kerosene. I googled it today and noticed that Amazon still sells these heaters.
         In addition to wanting to get away and have a change in Christmas, we decided since all of our adult-children had met recently at our grandson Winslow’s wedding, this would enable them to celebrate the holidays with their own families. Particularly in Steve and Tina’s case, they had to fly four of each family back and forth across the USA—which is expensive.
         We loved having our family all together each year and look forward to finding out how this major change works out. I’ll report!