Christmas Memories

About the Book

This book is a memoir of the Christmas traditions plus a collection of short stories embodying the most memorable Christmases of Edmund and Virginia Hansen during their first fifty years of marriage.

The short stories include:

          Christmas 1956

            Our first Christmas together and we baked the Christmas Tree.

          Christmas 1959

            We knew we weren’t in Kansas anymore when our plane landed in a raging blizzard in Chicago.  What happened next was a traveler’s worst nightmare.

            Christmas 1963

            Family Christmas activities are always planned to the minutest detail.  Having a baby on Christmas day wasn’t planned, but it happened.

            Christmas 1979

            Suddenly, right after Thanksgiving, a family of Southeast Asian refugees arrived at our airport without sponsors.  The five little girls with ages between 3 and 11 stole our hearts and our family increased by seven.

            Christmas 1987

            The Christmas wedding of our youngest son was planned but thieves almost ruined the occasion.  It was rescued by the magic-of-Christmas.

            Christmas 1992

            How do you spend Christmas 1992 with your sick son knowing he will not live to see Christmas 1993?  We faced this dilemma and see how is was handled.

            Christmas 1993

            One son dead and another critically wounded in combat.  How do you survive all this and still celebrate Christmas?

            Christmas in July 2005

            The occasion was the wedding of an Asian granddaughter.  As patriarch of the family my toast speech was:  Remembrances, Dreams and the Fourth of July.

            Christmas in June 2006

            Our 50th wedding celebrations, all of them.      

About the Author

            Both Edmund and Virginia were born at the same hospital in Appleton, Wisconsin in 1936 and 1938 respectively.

            They met in high school and started dating in early 1954 at the ages of 17 and 15 and married June 29, 1956.  Edmund graduated from college in 1958 and started his teaching career at Wausau Senior High School in Wausau, Wisconsin.

            Ed’s teaching career spanned 35 years with four years of teaching secondary mathematics in the communities of Wausau and Manitowoc and remaining 31 years at his alma mater, the University of Wisconsin--Oshkosh.

            The Hansen’s were blessed with four sons born in 1958, 1959, 1963 and 1967.  All four boys are now college graduates.  Virginia, who passed up college to marry Edmund, got her opportunity at age 37 and graduated  magna cum laude four years later while still mothering the boys.

            The Hansen family sponsored Southeast Asian refugees starting in 1979 including three related units totaling seventeen individuals which they considered family when the relationship matured.

            Dean, the third son, contracted HIV in 1985 and after it progressed to AIDS Edmund and Virginia became the primary caregivers for his final fifteen months.  Dean passed away in 1993.  But this involvement did come with repercussions.

            The stress of the fifteen months was too much for Edmund’s health which spiraled out of control forcing him to retire as a physically handicapped person at the age of 57 within eight months of Dean’s death.  The stress was exacerbated when Lee, the oldest son and a career Army officer, was seriously combat wounded in Somalia just four months after Dean’s death.

            With Dean’s death and the remaining three sons having their own families Edmund and Virginia took the opportunity to relocate to where they wanted to spend their retirement years.

            Since Virginia’s family had migrated to Florida Ed and Ginny chose this as their retirement state.  Upon retiring they sold their Oshkosh condo, gave away what would not be moved and moved to the retirement community of Sun City Center, Florida where they live as stress free a life as possible in the warm sun-filled climate of that state.

            Sun City Center is located in west-central Florida about 20 miles southeast of the city of Tampa.