Prompt Of The Week: Write about your favourite childhood memory

Write about your favourite childhood memory

It would have to be a Christmas memory, I guess. When I was four, there was an ice storm in the middle of the night. The ice brought down the power lines. We had no electricity Christmas morning. We opened our presents by candlelight and had breakfast at a truck stop diner. I had pancakes and couldn't finish them. There were three and I got full after eating one and a half.

We had Christmas dinner at my aunt and uncle's house in town. Their power didn't go out, so dinner went on as planned. My grandmother's Aunt Barbara was there (my grandmother wasn't - she lived in Florida). Barbara was 89 years old at the time. This was the only Christmas that she had dinner with us.

Our rules were very strict for family gatherings. Children were supposed to sit still and be quiet. My sister and I sat on the couch doing nothing until dinner was ready. My dad and uncle sat in the armchairs talking about whatever. They had nothing in common, so had to wing it in order to find something they could talk about.

My mom, aunt, cousin Lu (who was not yet a teenager, but she liked to think she was a grown woman), and Aunt Barbara were all in the kitchen, talking and getting dinner ready. They were also baking cookies, it seemed.

At one point, Aunt Barbara came out of the kitchen and came into the living room with a cookie sheet full of cookies straight out of the oven. She let my sister and me take a cookie from the sheet. They were sugar cookies, and each one had a single silver ball, about the size of a BB, sitting on top. These silver balls may have looked pretty, but they were hard to chew and they didn't taste very good.

@blindDaisy9121

My favorite childhood memory has to be what we did for some of my birthdays. It might be some of my friends' favorites too. I usually had 6-10 friends show up, and there were four parts to it.

For the first part, we'd go swimming at my grandma's pool. We had water guns, splash bombs, diving sticks, a diving board, and the pool was something like 10 feet deep in the deep end. That was always a lot of fun, and we usually spent a couple of hours midday with this.

After that was presents and food. It was usually pizza ordered in, but one time we went to a pizza buffet, and once we grilled hamburgers and hotdogs. During food was the presents, and I'd be spoiled by everyone.

The best part of being spoiled with gifts though was the third part, where we'd play my new video games or with my new toys at my house. Usually there would be five or six of us left at that point. This would last until pretty late.

Then comes the best part of all. My dad would be gone, and my mom would hole up in the far room to sleep. We'd get out of bed and block any and all light coming in through the windows, and we'd play pitch-black-hide-and-seek all night. We all knew the layout of the house, but there were plenty of places to hide, and between rounds, we'd regroup and clean anything up that has been messed with.