Last year we spent Christmas in Southern California. This year we spent Christmas in Southern Florida – Key West, to be exact.

It was early July when we started listening to Christmas music. Sometimes waiting twelve whole months for Christmas to come is just too long of a wait.

In my opinion, Christmas in the camper isn’t too different as opposed to celebrating Christmas in a house. We still string Christmas lights from the ceiling, hang up stockings and tinsel, put out our wide assortment of Christmas decorations inside our camper, and set up our small Christmas tree (last year we had collected pine sprigs and neatly arranged them in a red vase). There are some notable differences, though. Like how we can’t make a gigantic pot of potato salad or kaputsnica because we don’t have the space to store it in our 6-cubic-foot refrigerator; or how we can’t bake cookies in our tiny propane-powered oven since it would take a long time to bake just one batch – and I know that from experience… hence the reason we gave Santa a few yorkies and a truffle instead of our usual homemade oatmeal cookies. The reindeer still got their carrots, though.

Each year for Christmas and New Year’s my family makes potato salad, kapustnica, and a lentil loaf (like a meatloaf, just without the meat). In case you’re wondering, kapustnica is a traditional Slovak Christmas soup made with sauerkraut, mushrooms, sausages, and various spices. My mom is Slovak, making me part-Slovak, so we like to include our Slovak heritage in our Christmas celebrations. Dessert is different every year; chocolate pies, cakes, sometimes fig bars, and before we started RVing, there was always at least five big batches of chocolate-chip cookies.

Finally, after a long year’s wait, Christmas Day came. Every year, my sisters and I like to watch Santa on his journey around the world through the online NORAD Santa Tracker. We also enjoy watching family Christmas movies together. This year we didn’t watch any family Christmas movies until the twenty-fourth (it’s a long story), so during dinner we started the movie Home Alone.

We didn’t get to bed as early as we’d hoped, but as we found the next morning, it wasn’t too late since Santa had left behind presents for us all.

One of my sisters woke me up at around seven in the morning. I had woken up earlier, but gone back to bed since my sisters had complained how I woke them up too early last Christmas (I think it was around four or five o’clock). My sisters and I watched The Polar Express until my parents got up, and once they did, we all opened our presents. I received a variety of gifts, including hair accessories, jewelry, a new pair of leggings, and a book. My top three favorite presents are all very sparkly: a glass bracelet, an amethyst necklace (made and given to me by one of my sisters), and a gem-embedded hair clip.

To end 2022, my dad planned a few last exciting adventures – including a trip to Tampa’s Busch Gardens – but more on that in my next blog posts.

I hope you had a very Merry Christmas, and have a Happy New Year!

Vivienne