Christmas and Family

Hello dear friends!  The video I have chosen for this post is Violin music - Christmas song - Silent night instrumental - piano and violin.  You can listen to it without having to watch, as the image stays pretty much the same.  I hope you enjoy it!  There is a reason I chose Silent Night.  Interesting tradition it has in my family.  This song always drew my grandmother (my mother's mother) to tears, it drew my mother to tears and yes, you guessed it, it brings me to tears.  There is something about this Christmas carol that touches me deeply, as I hope it will touch you all.

Since I have some new blog readers and followers, and since it has been quite a while since I have talked about my family, I thought...what better time than Christmas to share about family?  My father's birthday was December 19th, and my mother's was December 24th.  I am an only child, my mother had four miscarriages before I was born, and, again, before I was born, 6 years before, my brother Richard was born in June, 1950.  Sadly, he died seven months later of bronchiole pneumonia.  I was born on October 27th, 1956, and my mother was 40 when I was born, so I was the only child.  

My parents didn't have much.  We had no car, my mother wasn't well enough to work, my father worked the best he could different jobs to support my mother and I.  He worked as a cleaner in an ice cream parlour, as an elevator operator, as the sexton of a church and as a cleaner of trains for CP Rail.  (not all at the same time, of course).  When I was 13, my father lost his last job at the Presbyterian church where he worked as a sexton.  He was a prisoner of war in WWII, and sadly had trouble forgetting the horrible experiences he had.  He did forgive his captors, though...he just never forgot the sufferings he had and ended up spending the last 14 years of his life in a military hospital.  He and I remained in close contact and I visited him often and he came to visit me a couple of times as well.

The photos I am sharing here with you all in this post are of my late mother, late father and late brother, Richard.  Unfortunately my childhood photos, with the exception of one, were all lost in a fire we had several decades ago when I was a child, so I hope you will enjoy these.  I will share one of my childhood photos (and perhaps a couple of others) in a future post.  My family photos

Thank you all so much for visiting me here, and for taking the time to read this long post about my family.

I really appreciate and enjoy reading your thoughts, which you can always share by clicking on the 'comments' link at the end of my post.