2013 Day 14 - Places We Go

Christmas always revolved around my father's family - his parents lived in Saskatoon and we always had Christmas (either a few days before and the day of OR a day or so afterwards) with my grandparents.  They would take turns being at our place, or down in Calgary with my Uncle's family - and they would leave wherever they were, to go to the other home around Dec 27....so that we'd all have some time with our grandparents during the Christmas break.

One thing that came back to mind (that I had totally forgotten) while thinking about this was mixed nuts!

One of the things that was brought to eat was bags of in-the-shell mixed nuts - lots and lots of nuts - at least a bag each of walnuts, almonds, filberts/hazelnuts, Brazil nuts.  All of the grocery stores had piles of nuts setup in the produce area and you scooped as many as you wanted in bags and paid for it by weight.  My parents had this big green bowl that they'd keep stocked with nuts and sitting out on the coffee table in the living room with nut openers sticking out of the nuts for anyone to use.

This is a tradition from my father's family because I remember that he and his parents would eat and eat nuts all day long - I can still hear the crack, crack, munch of them eating nuts.  I would have a few and it is totally addictive, but if I had a few in a row that were harder to open, I'd lose interest.  My mother also joined in with the nut eating, but it really was my father and his mother that were the BIG nut lovers.

NOW, there are still these kinds of nuts around to purchase, but not like the quantity there was before and often they are in a (small) bag where the types of nuts are already mixed.  I'm not sure my parents still purchase them, and if they do, they don't have them out on Christmas, that I can remember.

After my Granny stopped being able to come up for Christmas, the nut quantity at Christmas time dwindled.  One reason was that Mom thought it was too fattening to eat so many nuts (which is true...they ate a TON of nuts) and I think it was around that time it started to get harder to find the nuts still in the shell (which I presume is because it got more expensive).