MEMORIES- Sweet Memories
The blog topic given to me by Michelle was Christmas memories / Holiday memories. There are so many, I just don’t even know where to begin, so I will just start rattling things off.My sister and I are very lucky because we had a yearly tradition of getting a Christmas ornament (or 2) every year, which my mom would label with the year it was given. When we were married off, she gave them all to us to have forever, and has now started giving ornaments to our kids and doing the same thing. I have to say I look forward to decorating the tree every year purely to go through the box and see all the memories. This year was pretty special when I hung up the ornaments from the year I was born – 30 years ago!!Another AWESOME Christmas tradition we have is having a seafood feast for our Christmas meal. When we were younger, we would have peel and eat shrimp with big bowls of butter, a baked potato and a salad. We would have a competition between my dad, my sister and myself about who could eat more. It was delicious. It has now morphed into something all sorts of crazy. This year we had shrimp, crab legs, lobster tails AND scallops. I mean, living in ND/MN, that’s pretty freaking cool.I also have a very crazy, fond memory of when I was younger and we got our first desktop computer. I think it was probably around like 1995/1996. I remember sitting at the computer playing on the program Paint for hours and just being blown away. To think how much technology has changed since then is pretty crazy. This not only brings back really fond memories, but also makes me feel just old. Really, really old. I’m imagining sitting around the Christmas dinner table and telling my grandkids that I was a kid when the first home computers came out and being laughed at. With age comes wisdom – or better jokes – or something….My last favorite memory, that came crashing to the front and center, was the awesome, and I don’t know if that’s even a good enough adjective to describe it, sister photos we did every year for the holiday card. It was literally epic. Especially when we were young (see photo attached to this blog). We would wear matching outfits and do something similar with our hair and just be cool. My mom has these treasures scattered around the house still to this day.**Side note about the above picture. I used to be so jealous my sister got to wear glasses that I would try to fake my way through the eye test. WHAT was wrong with me?!?Since this really has nothing to do with our industry, here is how I am going to link this in. Maybe you can think of a way to do something like this for your company. Especially based on the idea of having a yearly tradition. How about a custom ornament to give to everyone each year that has something to do with a big moment for the company in the previous year? A big, giant pot luck with built in challenges/contests and prizes to go along with it? A yearly photo. Give everyone a color to wear or a theme – it would be a great thing to have to for a display piece someplace in the building.Whatever it is, find a way to make the holidays special. We’d love to help in any way that we can. I mean, if you need me for photo styling, I’m obviously the most qualified. :)- Shannon Kirby