Colleen Kesterson of Condon remembers the smell of Christmas. She said, "Always the fragrance of pine and fir bring back memories of the sweet smell filling our house after a day's trudge through the woods to find and cut our Christmas tree. Also, I remember the evergreen boughs were placed near the heaters and their fragrance filled the church on Christmas Eve. All through the winters in the 70s, when I moved to the Swan Valley, I could smell the trees every time I stepped outside – Christmas continued."
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Willie Freyholtz from Seeley Lake said her most memorable Christmases were "The sleigh rides they used to have down at Dan's Discount [in Seeley Lake]. It was fun. Everybody came and got hot chocolate and got to ride the sleigh around and back and then go see Santa."
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Patricia Sinz said "I lived in many places throughout the U.S., but I always wanted to have Christmas in the snow. My first Christmas here [Condon] was 2011 and we had a lot of snow and I just loved looking at it. It was like living in a fantasy land – fairyland I call it when it all sparkles."
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Shauna Haines, while shopping in Seeley Lake, said, "Probably my most memorable Christmas gift was a dresser doll. I had wanted one forever. I used to go in all the stores and look at the dresser dolls. I was in love with them – and I finally got one for Christmas." [A dresser doll is a porcelain figure meant to sit on the dresser.]
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Grace Grabofsky of Condon said she her most memorable Christmas was an unpleasant one. In the mid-50s she was a teenager living in Brooklyn, NY. That was the year they came out with the silver fake trees. She said, "I'll never forget coming home from school and there in the room, instead of a huge, green, live Christmas tree was a silver pom-pom tree – and I didn't like it!"
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Kim Grover of Seeley Lake said her most memorable present was an automatic car starter that her husband gave her. She said, "I can start the car from inside the house and it will already be warm when I get into it."
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Denise Short of Ovando said, "My most memorable Christmas was when my son was two and he opened up his tricycle. He looked in the box, then looked at his daddy and said, 'It's broken!'" Short went on to say that same year his grandmother had crocheted him an afghan and he looked at it and said, "A rug!" Her son is now 39 and Denise said he has the afghan at his home.
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Olivia Reinitz of Seeley Lake remembers a Christmas that started out horrible but turned out memorable. She woke up with the stomach flu. She said, "It had to be the most miserable Christmas ever. But at about six o'clock the doorbell rang and there was my sister. We didn't even know she was coming but she flew in from North Dakota just to be with us for Christmas and then she stayed with us for a while."
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