Best and Worst Christmas Experiences

Thinking back over my many, many Christmases, it's easy to pick out which is the worst. The best Christmas is definitely more difficult to decide upon - any Christmas spent with family and friends is truly wonderful - but I would have to settle on ones from when I was a child.

The Worst:
My worst Christmas was relatively recent, back in 2007. My fiance and I live in different countries and on this year I travelled to the USA to be with him. Things were going great until perhaps a week before Christmas when he told me that he may to have to go out of State, over Christmas. I was almost 5,000 miles from home, knew no-one other than my fiance and his kids, and we were staying in a trailer home way out in the country. Now while I understand his reasons for going away, it was not 100% essential that he do so, he had a choice. What he chose to do was to leave me completely alone and stranded two days before Christmas, returning two days after Christmas. So on Christmas morning, I woke up alone in a trailer in the middle of nowhere and spent the entire day alone, eating a cardboard-like frozen pizza for Christmas dinner.

I'm sure that others have had worse Christmas experiences than this, but to me, this one was pretty bad!

The Best:
When I was a child, every Christmas was wonderful. My father was still alive and Christmas was a huge family event. What made it great wasn't the quantity of presents that my sister and I received from all of our relatives, it was the huge family gatherings that took place later in the day. Wherever we had Christmas dinner, there were up to 20 people crowded around the dinner tables. No-on in the family had a table large enough so all of the kids (myself, my sister and our cousins) always sat at a smaller table tacked on at the end of the main dining table. Being British, Christmas crackers were a must and everyone pulled their cracker, read the joke from inside and wore their silly paper hat. After dinner we'd watch corny Christmas Specials on television and play party games.

Nowadays Christmas is a much smaller affair in my family. The thing that makes it special for me now is to spend time with my niece, nephews and my great nephews on Christmas morning.

Christmas Feel Good Movies

It's a Wonderful Life (1946)

Plot: A rather unlikely looking angel helps a desperately frustrated man (James Stewart) by showing what life would have been like had he never existed.

Despite being an old black and white movie (there are digitally colorized versions available), It's a Wonderful Life remains a Christmas classic to this day. It demonstrates the ways in which we touch the lives of others and to some extent, the butterfly effect that our actions can have.

We give this movie ***** - five Christmas stars!