This Christmas will be our first Christmas without my grandpa. He is the first of my grandparents to pass away. My grandmother and he were together over 60 years. Tomorrow she closes on the house they shared for over 40 years, and her new house in the same town as her surviving daughter, grandkids, and great-grandkids.
I will spend tomorrow watching the movers remove everything from the house I have spent almost every holiday of my life in. If you looked at the photo album of my childhood, that house is the backdrop for almost every picture. It will be a hard day, sitting in that place all alone as it becomes a hollow shell.
Most of the familiar items will be moving to the new house, but it's still hard to let go of a place that has been such a part of your life. I can't imagine how hard this is for my grandmother, though it would be harder for her to stay there alone. Surrounded by everything that was theirs for so long.
I did not intend this to be about the loss of my grandfather, and the house that was my second home during my childhood, but I guess I needed to express those feelings.
My grandmother is a greet lover of old-fashioned correspondence: hand-written letters, Christmas and birthday cards. Even though many of her family and friends have passed on she gets quite a few Christmas cards. Previously in my blog, I had documented the progress on the cross-stitch portion of this gift. I had hoped to finish it last year, but now I'm glad that I didn't. I plan on hanging it up in her new house tomorrow as a house-warming/Christmas gift. I'm hoping that having one thing up for Christmas that is just her's will help the year be a little easier.
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