New Friend Friday...

I almost opted out of this meme. Diana at The Girl Creative hosts New Friend Friday simply because I couldn't think of anything to write for this week's topic.

This week's topic is Favorite Childhood Memory. I had a great childhood and I have lots of memories, I think. The problem is that memories of my children's childhoods are crowding out my memories from my own childhood....

So, I finally found a memory from my childhood and dusted it off and here it is....

My all-time favorite place in the world was my grandparent's Michigan lake home. We called it the "cottage" but it truly was a 4-season house. My grandfather had asthma and emphysema issues and so my grandparents would go to Arizona in the winter. This left the cottage empty for several months.

When I was in high school, our family started going to the cottage for Christmas every year. We would drive 1 1/2 hours with the Christmas decorations, gifts and a tree and assemble our Christmas celebration at my grandparent's empty home. It was wonderful! There was no TV, no phone but lots of time to read and play games. Many, many nights of rowdy card games!!

And lots of food. For some reason, that house always had lots of food. My grandmother would cook for an army all summer long (including bounty from her garden and fresh hot cookies almost every day) and we all would cook and bake a lot over the Christmas holiday. And, of course, eat a lot....

This tradition of going to the cottage for Christmas actually continued until after Chad and I were married. To my best recollection, there were about 10 years where we would go to the cottage for Christmas. I'm not sure if we went every year in that time but I know we went often. We all loved it!

So many of my favorite childhood memories are based at that lake house. It was an amazing place to be!