- November 2, 2024
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The holidays have a way of changing people, if only for a season, but none the less you might find yourself doing things you might normally not do.
Maybe it's a tradition that requires time and consideration like replicating your mother's famous plum pudding recipe. Perhaps it's forgetting to take the giblets out of the turkey and it explodes inside the oven. Regardless these memories and mishaps hold a dear place in our hearts. We asked members of the community to share their favorite holiday stories.
“As children growing up in a largely undeveloped area of Sarasota County, my five siblings and I never gave much thought to swimming in lakes or creeks that had alligators in them; in fact, that’s all there was. We even had a 10-foot gator that occupied the lake in our front yard. We swam with it for years without conflict. But that all changed one cool, late-December day when the gator decided to defend its sunning area by getting up on all fours and chasing my younger brother and father into our home (now Roessler’s Restaurant).
“My mother was not one to stand passively for this aggressive behavior. She was an excellent shot who had retired many diamondback rattlesnakes and other unwelcome vermin through the years. She went into the house, retrieved and loaded her Remington Savage, single-shot, 20-gauge shotgun and proceeded to meet the gator face to face. As she only had small game shot on hand, she had to get 15 to 20 feet away in order for the shot to be effective. The first shot dropped the gator dead in his tracks. But just to be sure, Mom reloaded, walked to within just a few feet of the gator and fired again. She then calmly returned to the house to call the wildlife officers out to retrieve a nuisance alligator. After that, the rest of the holiday season seemed uneventful.”
-Jon Thaxton, Senior vice president for community investment, Gulf Coast Community Foundation
Gator country
“As a fourth-grader, I was hospitalized with pneumonia over the Christmas holiday. I spent my days enclosed in a clear, see-through tent that surrounded my bed, allowed out for only trips to the bathroom. I had an IV in my arm the entire time, and as a 9-year-old, I was pretty bummed that my Christmas was spent in a hospital bed. On Christmas morning, my parents brought me a brand new bike to my hospital room, and I wanted to ride it so bad, but knew that I couldn’t.
The nurses must have read my mind – they took me out of the tent, let me get on the bike and ride a few laps around the floor, all the while wheeling my IV beside me. This time of year is always a reminder to try to make a difference in someone’s life the same way the nurses did for me.”
-Kelly M. Defebo, Director of Sales Visit Sarasota County
“I think that in coming here the holidays are all about embracing the new because you’re not going to recreate a northeastern holiday season. So it’s on to something different. Thanksgiving morning, I hit the beach and took a dip in the Gulf. It was absolutely great. This is my first tropical holidays and I’m having a great time.
“Both of my boys Luke, 10, and Noah, 5, go to Southside Elementary School. I was able to bring Noah to the Southside Village Holiday Stroll and there was nothing funnier to me then having a snow slide in Sarasota and that coupled with the fake snow. My son Noah went right down and had a blast. I thought it was genius.”
-Jennifer Rominiecki, President and CEO of Marie Selby Botanical Gardens
“Even in my advancing years and being of the Jewish faith, I still have vivid memories of our parents pampering us with presents piled on the bottom of our beds to greet us when we woke up very early on Christmas mornings when we were very young. I can still recall my joy at dressing up in my Roy Rogers outfit and shooting my gun with caps at my brother. My wife, who is also Jewish, remembers receiving her Dale Evans outfit on Christmas morning. Can’t see my daughter indulging our grandchildren in a similar manner. We are buying them iPod Shuffles. How times have changed.”
-Ian Black, Ian Black Real Estate
“Someone called our communications office and mentioned that folks were singing Christmas carols inside the aquarium. I headed down to check it out.
“When I got to the exhibit gallery, the singing was done, but the small group of carolers remained. They were Florida Master Naturalist candidates who were practicing their educational, interpretive skills beside one of our exhibits, and they were highlighting – you guessed it – the Christmas tree worms.
“Next came an even funnier surprise: One member of the group was my former high school chemistry teacher. We had a good chat. I wish I had thought to tell him that I once memorized my college biology notes by setting them to music – one time I even set them to ‘We Wish You a Merry Christmas.’ That said, I was never brave enough to sing out my biology facts in a public aquarium.”
-Hayley Rutger, content development manager at Mote Marine Laboratory and Aquarium
“When I first moved to Florida, I was a server, and some of my co-workers couldn’t go home for Thanksgiving. So, my sister and I went out and bought a huge turkey. We get to checkout, and the cashier asked if we were cooking it today.
“It was my first turkey, and I go to put my hand inside it, and it had the bag inside with the guts.
“Did you know that if a turkey explodes in the oven, it looks like shag carpeting everywhere?
“When it was almost done, it was hot enough that the air expanded in the plastic bag, and it popped.
“Fortunately for me, my sister cleaned the oven because she was afraid my mom would see it.”
“Now, my husband and I use a Table Top Rotisserie and put it outside to cook. My sister and her family are coming this year for Christmas, and we’re sticking it outside so there’s no danger.”
-Laura Coyle, director of marketing at All Faiths Food Bank
“My mother, who came from Wales, would always make a plum pudding for Christmas dinner. She could make it flame because she realized that lemon extract has a high alcohol content. She would soak sugar cubes in the lemon extract. It made a beautiful blue glow when the lights were on.”
-Amy Ferrell, Sarasota resident
Like many Hispanic families, my mom loves to cook traditional Hispanic foods for Christmas. As many Hispanic daughters can attest, no one cooks traditional foods like our moms. Every year, I go to New York City to visit Mom, bringing with me one empty luggage to fill with food for my trip home. Mom makes a delicious Puerto Rican specialty called pasteles, which are rectangular meat fill patties with an outer portion made of plantains. She also makes a wonderful Puerto Rican tropical eggnog called Coquito.
I bring back pasteles, which are frozen and tied together in bundles and a large thermos filled with Coquito. The heavy luggage contains as much of her food I can carry to share with my local family and friends.
My first big fear is to be pulled from the plane when Homeland Security puts my food-filled luggage through an X-ray machine and sees dozens of items resembling bricks side by side with a long cylinder on one end, possibly looking like explosives.
My second big fear is that once Homeland Security realizes it's not explosives, they will still confiscate the goods. In that scenario, I would wind up going home empty handed while someone at TSA may be enjoying a nice meal and drink. Lucky for me, it has not happen yet, and hopefully, won't in the future.
-Lourdes Ramirez, Board League of Women Voters
“I was fascinated by bubble lights. We had them all over our tree. I was fiddling with them, and I broke one. The liquid leaked from the lights and shorted out everything.
“This was in the ’50s, and at the time, we had the breaker boxes with the fuses, and it blew out. There weren’t any hardware stores open at the time.
“I also grew up across the street from six boys, and back then, the tinsel was made out of some kind of lead, and it was really heavy...When you would take it and wad it up, it made the greatest balls of metal to hit each other with...We gathered all that stuff up and had a battle. We all got in trouble for that.”
-Larry Kelleher, digital preservationist, Sarasota County Historical Resources
During all my years with NBC News, I volunteered to work on Christmas. Single, childless and career-fixated, I was happy to work on family-oriented holidays. And there was always the hope that news would rear its ugly head, and I’d get an exciting assignment.
In 1981, a few days before Christmas, martial law was declared in Poland. Remember Lech Walesa and Solidarity and all that? I got a call from the foreign desk in New York saying, “You need to fly to London. When you arrive we’ll let you know where to go from there.”
I was directed to Copenhagen and then to Malmo, Sweden, to meet ferry boats of Polish refugees escaping across the Baltic Sea from Gdansk, Poland. I remember standing on the dock with a videotape crew from Paris who had flown in to work with me. Very cold and windy.
And while that was happening, an American Army general, assigned to NATO, James Dozier, was kidnapped by the Red Brigades in Italy. The Foreign Desk called. “Get on a plane…”
This was another big story. Journalists were there from all the U.S. TV networks and major newspapers, and most European news outlets as well.
I had a camera crew from the NBC News Tel Aviv Bureau and hired an interpreter from the local university. I ended up spending Christmas in Verona, Italy. We journalists found a restaurant that was open Christmas afternoon and had a festive meal together. We ate well. Some wine was consumed. We toasted one other and said, “How lucky are we?” For years we kept in touch.
The assignment lasted until Gen. Dozier was miraculously rescued in February 1982. Not a traditional Christmas by any standard, but certainly a memorable one. I have revisited Verona almost annually because of the friends I made there and then.
-Ellen McKeefe, producer, NBC News
“Years ago, I bought this tree topper. It’s glass and has Santa in a big globe.
(This year), our dog, Shelby, was wagging her tail. Of all the glass ornaments, her tail hit the tree topper, and it went flying and shattered into a million pieces.
...I was walking by a little flower shop, and I stopped in my tracks because I saw a tree topper that looks like the one that we had. I told (the woman in the store) I was looking for a tree topper because ours broke. She said there was a man just in here who said that he was looking for a tree topper and that his dog broke his. It was the same story. She described him, and it was my husband. We both went there the same day looking for a tree topper.”
-Clare Carter, Sarasota resident
“One of my recollections is my dad deciding that he was way too tired, and he wanted to sleep in (Christmas morning). There were four children in our family, and he decided to tie our doorknobs together.
The problem was that many children can’t wait that long to go to the bathroom when they wake up in the morning. So it
did keep us in our rooms, but let’s just say there was more than coal in someone’s stocking. It wasn’t a prank; we were just trying to make do. I guess my parents got to sleep in a little longer.
I don’t remember anyone being upset, but there was a lot of laughter. We didn’t feel bad; we just felt desperate. We all laugh about it now, and I even wrote a poem about it.”
-Catherine Luckner, Siesta Key resident
“My family escaped from Belarus in the midst of World War II just after I was born. My father didn’t know where we were going.
“When I started having memories of Christmas, we were already in the U.S. as ‘displaced peoples.’ On Christmas, we just used to go to church. Presents weren’t part of the holiday in the beginning because my parents had no money. Even as things got better, each child – I had two sisters and one brother – got one present.
In 1967, I was dating Joe. He invited me to his family’s Christmas in Philadelphia. I stepped inside, and I saw a mountain of gifts.I was absolutely floored by this mountain of gifts, coming from a family where Christmas meant four kids, four gifts.
Joe proposed that Christmas, and I accepted.
Because Joe always had that kind of a Christmas, he wanted to follow the same tradition, and that’s what we’ve done.”
-Lana Volpe, Sarasota resident
