Robert Rausch, a website visitor from Monett, Missouri, shares this charming
memory with us:

As a boy, growing up on a farm in the Missouri Ozarks in the 1950's, I was aware we didn't have a lot of money to spare, and about age nine or ten, I began to trap rabbits using homemade wooden traps.  I would generally put 4 rabbits a week on my Mom's dinner table, and these bunnies were much appreciated, as our Pop was having a difficult time during those years.  She would make rabbit-pot-pie out of them with homemade biscuits on top!  Yum!

Rabbit season was always in the cold months, and many a December day, after feeding the cows, moving hay with the tractor or doing my other chores, I would be setting out from the barn right before sunset It would take me about 20 minutes to get over to where my traps were set, along a brushy fencerow on Uncle Albert's farm, across the blacktop from our place.  It'd take another 25 minutes to check all my traps and I would often be walking back across snowy fields through a
dusky December gloom, for there were no houses visible along the way. Often a frigid North wind would be pushing at me, as I trudged along across Albert's pastures.  Somewhere near his pond, I would top the final hill right across from our place, and the memory of that scene is forever in my mind.  For in the distance, guiding me home through the cold gloom would be the front windows of our little farm house and the Christmas Lights in the living room window.  Our little farm house
didn't have a very modern bathroom or kitchen, and so the windows always steamed up in the winter, and all of December in those days, I'd top that last hill and see the orange, red, green & blue Christmas Lights through those steamed up windows.  Surely this is one of the nicest Christmas Memories I have.

I truly enjoyed the remembrances of other people's Christmases past.  One I personally can never forget is 1958 when, at the height of Mamie Eisenhower pink, my mother decided we needed a pink tree, with pink ornaments and pink lights around the roof edge of the house.  Initially, my father went along with this as they wanted very much to be in the forefront of style.  In retrospect, it amazes me that there were pink Christmas lights available,  but there were and so they went around the house.  What seemed like a good idea to my father paled upon seeing an all-pink Christmas house.  By then the tree was up and all was theoretically, done.  After much fuss, my mother gave in to my dad's late-in-the-game traditionalism, and added Santa heads made of pink painted Styrofoam balls with black crescent felt eyes, red hatpin noses and red and white hats and white beards.  This did break up the all-pink appearance.  I still have but one of those additional Santas and I treasure it.  Years later, my father developed Alzheimer's and his memory of that Eisenhower Christmas was so clear that when we saw magenta-pink lights available at a store, we purchased them and strung them around his roof edge at his senior citizen home to much shared laughter by all in remembrance of the fist pink Christmas.
 

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