Wednesday, December 17, 2008

Favorite Christmas Vacation

What was one of the best Christmas vacations that we had? I have one in mind that really stood out in my mind.

4 comments:

Dean Strong said...

I remember the year we built the tube run up at Mutual Dell. That Christmas vacation was a lot of fun.

Natalie Strong said...

When I came along, they had given up on the Christmas vacations, so I don't have anything to add to that---Sorry.

Gordon said...

First of all, Natalie, Christmas vacation was the time off from school between Christmas and New Years. We called it Christmas Vacation.
Dean remembers the same vacation that I do. It was one of those times when everything comes together just right. Wayne had been living at the "Y" going to school, but he came home for the Holidays.
I was a scout at the time, so I must have been 12 or 13. The scouts had made an inner tube run at Mutual Dell earlier that winter. Between Christmas and New Years, we all piled in to Wayne's red Buick and would head up American Fork Canyon every morning. It would snow during the night and I remember we followed the snow plow up the canyon a couple of times.
The tube slide that had been built was the last part of the Bear Roll Off trail at the bottom of Mutual Dell. There was a steep downhill part that made a sharp right hand turn and then went down-hill out to the ball field at the Dell.
The scouts had rigged some boards to bank the turn and packed some snow around it. We made the run longer, added another turn, and made it faster and better. We used that run a couple of days. It got overcrowded, so we decided to go somewhere else. Instead of going up to Mutual Dell, we tried Tibble Fork. At that time, Tibble Fork was brand new. There was a bowl-like area on the east side of the lake where they had excavated the dirt for the dam. We chose that area to make a new tube run.
Some people had walked across the lake on the ice to get to the bowl area. They ahd made a good downhill run with a bump at the bottom which was great. We went to the top and added a few turns before we hit the edge of the bowl. We went tubing every day that week, and even went up in the evening once.
I also remember that was the year that we finally put together the 2,500 piece puzzle I had received a few years before. It was too big to fit on a card table, so we had to get a bigger piece of cardboard to put on the table. We worked on the puzzle when we weren't out tubing. I think we also had a couple of Risk marathons that year.
All in all it was a fun, happy, Christmas. You know, I can't remember anything we got that year, but I'll never forget the fun we had as brothers and sisters being together making our own good times.

Dean Strong said...

Gordon's post brought back a lot of memories. That Christmas was so much fun because of all the things we did together. Our big brother Wayne was our hero and it was so special doing things with him that Christmas.