When I went to sleep last night I wasn’t sure what I was going to write about for Giftmas this year. But I dreamed of my grandmother, and her amazing house. And right before I woke, crying, I looked around her house and said, “I miss you, Grammy. And I miss your house too.”

So, I want to talk about my grandmother today but I’m not sure how to tie her into this fundraiser. And that’s not because I can’t think of a way, it’s because I can think of so many…

I’m going to go with this one:

For me, one of the best parts about the winter holidays is the food.

When I was a kid, money was tight and we occasionally relied on Christmas Hampers in order to make the season a wee bit brighter. Every year, though, my mom would host a Christmas Eve feast at home for our immediate family. This meal usually centered around a ham — where we got to use the ‘fancy’ glasses. And then Christmas morning, after we opened all our presents, we’d have breakfast — one of those mini-cereal boxes where you cut the face open and eat out of them like a bowl.

After breakfast we’d head over to Grammy’s for Christmas dinner (this feast was usually turkey-centric). Grammy had a big house on a corner lot of a small town (Nanton, AB). I actually just popped over to Google Maps to see if it could help me out and I found this image of her place from 2009 — when she was still living there:

I have a really big extended family, and we would fill that house — there were more people than places to sit, and the giant dining room table would be loaded with food, while the smaller table in the kitchen would be filled with dishes that couldn’t fit on the main table and, of course, dessert.

As I grew older, with a family of my own, some of the ways we celebrated Christmas changed — I even changed the name to Giftmas to reflect the secular nature of our celebration —  but for a big part of me still, even now, Christmas is dinner at Grammy’s house with all my extended family.

Perhaps that is part of why it’s so important to me to support the food bank? It’s true that when I was little we got assistance from the food bank, and it’s also also that while I was doing the single mom thing with my kid, I turned to the food bank for help to make our holidays brighter and those are the stories I usually tell in these fundraising blog posts. But.

But for today, at least, when I woke crying from a dream about missing my grandmother, the reason feels even more personal than that.

None of those feasts would have been the same without the food. I’m sure my family would have celebrated, we’d have tried to make the best of a bad deal, but it wouldn’t have been the same. Part of Christmas is about eating too much, it’s about the smells and the tastes and… And I’m supporting the food bank, in part, to help give that gift to other families who might need it.

My grandmother would approve.

Please click here if you, too, are able to help support the food bank financially this year.

Because of the magic of bulk-buying, corporate sponsorships, waste reduction and community outreach programs, the food bank can turn every Canadian dollar into three meals.

That means every single dollar helps.

If you can’t help out financially, perhaps you could help boost our signal by telling a friend? Or sharing this on social media? I’d really appreciate it.

Oh, and in case you missed it, if you like fantasy stories I’ve got a Forgotten Realms-themed holiday story that I wrote with the one and only Ed Greenwood right here –> GOLDEN SIMRIL GIFTS <– that is free for anyone to read.

Thank you so much!

(That’s nearly halfway to our goal — only $2 short!)