First Christmas

Childhood amnesia is the common term used for people's inability to remember anything from their first few years of life.

I don't usually do much reading in the field of psychology, but find this particular subject most interesting. I'm not gonna get heavy into it here today, as you can find a gillion articles online, written by far more learned folks than I, but will say that the theories behind why we can't recall our earliest years are as varied as they are numerous. And depending on who's doing the research, or who has written the most current paper, the age in which people are able to recall their first memory can vary from 2 to 8 years of age, with the average being in the 3-5 years old range.

Having read a bit about this subject, paying special attention to false memories, I feel like I, and anyone else who knows anything at all about this subject, can confidently say that no person can recall their first Christmas. Although, in my case, even if childhood amnesia couldn't be used to explain my lack of memory from my first Christmas, a recently unearthed photograph (which I had never seen before btw) taken on that first Christmas of mine, may have produced another excuse for my lack of memory:

Five months old, and already hittin' the sauce!

It's hard to tell from the photo if the day was that good, or that bad. I can't even go by the red eyes, as I've been around red-eyed people who were having a miserable time, and I've also been around red-eyed people who were having the time of their life. Though I do seem to have a bit of that shell-shocked look going on, but that isn't even always the best indicator of how someone is doing.

In all seriousness, this did have to be one of my better Christmases, in fact I know that the first five would've all had to have been pretty great, even if I can't remember any of them. I feel confident in making this assertion if only because those would've been the last five that my grandma was alive for, and we were still one big happy family at that point. It wasn't until after she was gone that everything started going downhill, I should know, I remember those later Christmases.

Not wanting to end the post on a negative note, I will mention that this photo was taken at my grandparents house (in Portland, OR for those that care), where the family Christmas was held through the first eight years of my life. I used to love this couch of theirs, which my grandpa kept until I was around 10 or 11, when he replaced it with a new overstuffed brown couch that was considerably less comfortable, and got way too warm during the summer.

Damn, that still ended on a negative note. Uh, well, that's all I've got for today, so I guess I'll just have to try and be a little less of a jaded Jonny the next time we meet...

Thanks for taking a moment to look at my page.