How does one handle leaving everything that they are used to? One day it is all there but in seconds it seems to disappear. I never imagined myself living in a "rental" never the less spending Christmas at one. A rental is something that is temporary right? What about the emotions that something temporary brings- do they always stay with you? The first Christmas my family and I celebrated when we moved from New York to the Jersey Shore was spent in a winter rental home. Never would I have thought that Christmas at our rental would change my life and open my eyes to what was truly important in life.
I thought it was selfish of my parents to "force us" to move to small town USA and resented the fact that I really had no say in the matter. To top it all off, our first Christmas away from "home" was being spent in a rental! Located at 564 Salmon Avenue in Manasquan, New Jersey, the winter rental was my home for seven months. But it was in that rental that I first realized how much I truly needed my family. Christmas in our "old" house was celebrated very traditionally. Each year the totes of decorations which had been passed down for generations were unwrapped and carefully put out on display while it was almost an honor to be the one to set my grandparents" Nativity set. .
Due to moving into the rental which was significantly smaller than our colonial home in New York, many of our totes of belongings went into storage. "No, that's in storage," became the familiar line as I soon learned that ALL of our Christmas totes had mistakenly gone into the storage unit. I was brought to tears. Moreover, I knew that we would never have another Christmas as special as years before, yet somehow I was so wrong.
The night before Christmas, after returning from dinner at my relatives I looked around our living room. I nearly burst out laughing. Usually our ten foot tree was freshly cut down by my father's axe, but this year was different.
