My grandmother’s ingenious holiday hack has me feeling nostalgic 30 years later: Our Best Life

WYOMING, Ontario – Early Christmas was magic.

Way back in the 1900s, as my kids say, before Halloween overlapped with Christmas decor in the stores and Black Friday took over the entire month of November, my grandmother invented Early Christmas.

Grandma was not whimsical. She was a former one-room schoolteacher, a stickler for manners whose living room was absolutely off-limits to her grandchildren. My cousins and I didn’t dare to step a sock-footed toe on that plush vacuum-lined carpet.

Except for every other year, during Early Christmas.

My grandparents spent every winter at a retirement community in Zephyrhills, Florida. They returned to their Ontario home for the holidays only every other year.

We visited Florida some years, spending a delightful week exploring a theme park, scour