Enjoying a quick visit to my hometown for the Thanksgiving holiday brought with it a chance to relax and reflect. At our delayed-by-a-day-due-to-snow Thanksgiving dinner, my nephew took the opportunity to ask my brother and I about some of our holiday memories.

We both laughed, as did my dad, when we remembered one Thanksgiving – very similar to this year, in fact – when a major winter snowstorm dumped several inches of snow overnight. My brother and I went out into our front yard to dig our bicycles out from under a foot of accumulated snowflakes. I think it was that year that my brother had the idea of taking the tires off the bikes and instead fitting them with a single ski – we ‘rode’ our bikes down the hill on a ski through the snow.

It brought up other memories for me, especially of the Christmas season, and thinking back to some favorite as well as some unusual gifts. One year my brother and I each got a ventriloquist dummy. If I remember right, that was also the year I received a ukulele and I know I spent way more time trying to learn to play songs on the ukulele than trying to learn how to throw my voice. Truth be told, the ventriloquist dummy was a little creepy and I always had the feeling it was moving its eyes when I wasn’t looking; kind of a ready-made horror movie. Though my brother and I both used them from time to time, neither one of us dedicated ourselves to the craft of ventriloquism.

Interestingly, a favorite gift of mine through the years was a tape recorder, which I distinctly remember using most of the day that Christmas doing interviews with family members about the holiday, what they enjoyed, what their favorite gift was, etc.

Just a little foreshadowing of what would literally become my career; to this day I am still interviewing people except now I record them on my phone, not with a microphone and a tape recorder.

However, it was very good training, as my first years in the work world were spent in radio and we used tape recorders all the time to get our ‘sound bites’ that went along with the news stories.

When I first got the tape recorder for Christmas, I often would hide it under the kitchen table to surreptitiously record our family at dinnertime … nothing earth-shattering but I think I did it in case my brother or sister confessed to something they had initially blamed on me. That probably never happened, despite my best eavesdropping efforts. I very clearly remember one time being hollered at for spitting out a pea – which as a kid I very much disliked – and claiming that “it got stuck in my throat” as a cover story for the very unacceptable spitting out of food.

Peas were fine picked fresh from the garden but it was just something about eating them hot that didn’t sit well with me when I was younger.

Our family traditions included going to my grandparent’s house (my dad’s mom and step dad) on Christmas Eve, which is where everyone gathered, always for a freshly made holiday meal, lots of presents under a big tree, and then wrapping up the evening by going to the candlelight service at church.

The holidays for me are about family, friends, food and fellowship … and continuing to make memories.

Marg Jackson is editor of The Oakdale Leader, The Escalon Times and The Riverbank News. She may be reached at mjackson@oakdaleleader.com or by calling 209-847-3021.