Friends and Family: the Best Gift of All

I see so many people running from store to store this holiday season looking for that ultimate gift, the one present that your mom, sister, brother, dad, daughter or son just HAD too have. I see people chasing after that "white Christmas" dream, the one were everything is perfect, everything goes the way it is supposed too. Well, let me tell you something, no matter how much money you spend on a gift, most often than not it will be thrown away in a year, and if it isn't, it will be forgotten, or re-gifted. No matter how much money you spend on presents, the receivers of said gifts wont remember two years down the road that it was in fact you who had gotten that gift for them.

In my personal opinion, the best gift for Christmas is being able to spend it with loved ones, whether they are friends or family it does not matter. Every year, when you are hanging your Christmas decorations on the tree, do you chat with your family about what an "awesome" present you got three years ago, or do you remember that your Aunt's pug chased the cat up the tree, thus causing the tree to come down on the now rather terrified pug? Do you talk about how many presents you scored? Or do you reminisce about the wonderful time you had sledding with your best friend Johnny, and then coming into the house and drinking a nice hot cup of cocoa, staring at the Christmas tree?

As a person who has lost three dearly loved people around the holidays. my fondest memories are of the special times spent with my grandmother who passed away the first of December of '97, my mother, who passed away Thanksgiving day of '99 and my "adopted" great grandma, Dotty, who passed away on the sixteenth of December, my twenty-first birthday, two years ago.