It has been too long since I have posted here.  I don't have the resources at my fingertips that I did in Missouri, but with a prompt from the "Light the World" initiative, I have decided to share a few memories of Christmas with my Mom & Dad, Virgil and Iola Lambson.

I have no memories of Christmas in Spanish Fork...I was only three when we moved in 1956 to Orem...but I have vivid images in my mind from those years.

My mom worked in those days at J.C. Penney which was located at the corner southeast corner of 100 West and Center Streets.  She carpooled  from Orem with a variety of Penney's colleagues (all women).  My Dad would often pick her up when she worked into the evening, and sometimes he would take us.

There was a drugstore next to Penney's called Skaggs...they were kind of like a small version of Wal-Mart (no groceries, mind you), but there was something unique about Skaggs.  They had an upper floor that they kept closed most of the year, but after Thanksgiving they opened it up and it was a fully decorated toy-store...or the closest thing we had to a toy-store growing up.  For us, it was one of the surest harbingers that the Christmas Season would roll forward, and there would be no stopping it (we didn't know about the Grinch at the time).

Penney's in those days also had a bulk candy section right in the middle of the first floor where you could get scoops of cinnamon bears, nonpareils, peanut clusters, orange slices or a number of other extraordinary treats.  Mom & Dad used to like to buy a bag of treats, then keep it hidden at home, only briniing it out as a special surprise.  One of their favorites was "bridge mix", I suppose so-called because it was an appropriate treat for people who played bridge (a 4-person card game) together.  It has an assortment of nuts and creams mixed in, and  am sure is the model you see in older Peanuts cartoons where someone has a bag of candy, invites someone to share it, they stick in their hand and inevitable get something they don't like...usually a coconut creme (I guess Charlie Schultz was "brainless").

Next to Skaggs was a Woolworth's  (one of a number of what used to be called "dime" stores because of the inexpensive things you could buy there), and next to Woolworth's, the big park that surrounded the Provo Tabernacle.  They used to decorate that park with a make-believe "candyland" type maze, made of glossy-painted sheet-metal, that we somehow never tired of....more entertainment if Mom was detained or if we arrived a bit early (one of which I always hoped would occur).  The major buildings were always decorated, and the streets in the "strings of street lights" manner referred to in the Christmas song Silver Bells.

I will post more in coming days...