gotohealth's Blog

 

Christmas Eve was always exceptional, from the snowy 1961 evening in Eastern Oregon to the snowy 2017 goodby on Mercer Island. 

 

Sam and I were married in Ontario, Oregon, at the First Baptist Church on Christmas Eve. It was a Sunday that year and the day my favorite Uncles would take time off from their Ontario Market business to be able to attend.

 

Sam created 56 more wonderful Christmas Eve memories. It was always special and always included the girls. One of the best memories is when we went to the Red Lion on Airport Way. Those days, restaurants were empty on Christmas Eve so we kind of had the whole place to ourselves. The memory was around 1971. WE WERE IMPRESSED and we still talks about the memory because the chef brought the salad ingredients on a cart to our table, tossing it and serving us individually!

 

I think that was the year Sam made me a charm bracelet with ten gold charms commemorating special moments in our 10 year marriage. Thereafter, I got a gold ring stapled to a silly card every year where we were out celebrating Christmas eve. My favorite is the ring that is the image of our house, we built in 1973. Another favorite is a black rock from our back yard, made to look like a rabbit with a gold heart on it’s butt, because that is my birth year sign. I often wear the cat curled up around a pearl because we saw the broadway musical CATS in New York that year.

 

A Sam favorite ring memory might be the illegal rock he picked up on our trip to Machu Picchu in Peru. It might also be the Mammoth Image ring commemorating a trip to the South Dakota Hot Springs Mammoth dig in 1995. Sam was Vice President of his high school senior class in Nampa, Idaho, and the president was Larry Agenbroad, Paleontologist, who created the Mammoth sight and has been on National Geographic Specials several times. 

 

Japanese style, Sam put an extra ordinary amount of thought into not being publicly recognized, but family were the benefactors for his private creativity and Love. We continue to revel in the legacy of 56 Christmas Eve gold ring memories, his 240 cartoon strips and his 40 years of never missing bi-monthly Shaklee newsletter drawings. 

 

There is more and more empirical evidence that Sam likely continues to extend his energy in what our family may be creating today? LOVE IT!!