A Christmas Note To The Granddaughters

Elsewhere they would tell me to take this post to the water cooler. It's going to be very, very sappy.  Cue Delilah.

There's a line in the linked song, "it doesn't feel like Christmas at all..." This is the fifth year since my retirement from the USAF and it's the first Christmas season for me that it doesn't feel like Christmas at all ... because I'm not celebrating it overseas.

I can't explain it. We returned from overseas in 1994 after 13 continuous years overseas, and then I spent another couple years overseas without my family in shorter segments. So, it's not like it was just last year. But maybe it took five years being away from 30 years of "buds" that it finally hit home.

Christmas overseas at fixed bases, temporary bases, bare bases, remote sites, --- too many, many stories. Too many memories.

1986. The first time on the Letterman Show. Wow.

1993. 

2000: with the USAF Singing Sergeants.

2003.

2005:
2006:

2008:
2009:
2010:
2011: the 25th anniversary on the Letterman Show.

1995, 2000, 2005, and 2009.

Orchestrating the song.

Mash-up.

One of my best memories: "everyone" singing along with Lee Greenwood when his surprise hit, "God Bless the USA" came out -- I was in the officer's club at Rota, Spain. Wiki says the song was released in 1984; that's about right. In 1984 I was in Rota, for the very first time in my life, having just arrived in Europe less than a eight months earlier. The US Navy treated Air Force folks very, very nicely. I was always impressed how well the US Navy always treated us.