Christmas Bears part 1

Every year when I start pulling boxes out from the closet under the stairs, the first box that gets opened is the one holding the Christmas bears.

From the first year we were married, Adam has found a Christmas bear. The first few years, he presented the bear to me. Much like Everything Else, that changed when we had children. He now surprises them with the bears. Because he’s a pretty creative bear himself, he finds creative ways to give the bears to the kids.

Every bear is lovingly named and remembered with a story of how it came to be part of the family…except for when we forget the name or circumstances behind the bear.

I have an annual promise of creating a scrapbook to document the bears so we can refer to the book and not falter in our devotion to the little guys. It’s sad to look into their expressionless, expectant faces and come up empty on what to call them. Since I may or may not ever make good on my promise of the scrapbook, I decided the least I could do was document them here on my blog and we can check back every year when bear amnesia sets in.

First there’s Smith.

Doesn't your heart go out to anything that ugly?

He was named after the grocery store, Smiths, which is where he was purchased one night in Provo, UT in 1995. I look at the poor tacky little grocery store bear and that first poor tacky little Christmas is conjured up. We had a small little tree—a real one—that didn’t smell one bit for some reason. We bought a scattering of red apples (which I still love) and some burlap looking ribbon that I tied into bows for the tree. We had few presents and even fewer decorations in our miniature apartment. We did however, have Smith. (He used to have a really ugly “jingle bell” that Braeden obligingly chewed into oblivion a few years later.)