Sisterly Christmas

My sister and I were born one year apart- 15 months, me being a June baby and she being a September baby.

Contrary to our chronologically similar ages, we act very much like older and younger sister. She calls me "unnee," (언니), which is what a younger sister calls an older sister in Korean. She never addresses me by name, which is traditional in Korea but not so much here for the disrespectful Korean-Americans.

As children, we were very close- not to say we're not close now, but we were inseparable as kids. We grew up hearing our mother telling us, over and over again, "All you have is each other. If anything happens to Dad and me, you just have each other." Doom and gloom, that mother of ours. We didn't play with neighbors or school friends as much as we just played amongst ourselves, a party of two.

If that didn't make us weird enough already, my mom used to make a lot of our clothes for us, so the three of us girls would be dressed in similar or even identical outfits, generally dresses. We didn't find that at all odd during our childhood, and I have fond memories of our vividly printed sundresses that we would wear while all the other little girls were dressed in T-shirts and shorts.

Every year, just after Thanksgiving, boxes and boxes of Christmas decorations are pulled out of the garage. There are definitely newer additions, like sparkling LED lights and giant outdoor ornaments, but there are some old, old relics that bring back memories, including several of the ornaments on the tree in the photo below.

I don't know how old we are in the picture- all I know is that it makes me smile. It's up on the refrigerator at the moment, and when my sister saw it, she said, "That's so me. Why did I always make the weirdest faces in pictures?" The funny thing is, she still does it. And it's still just as cute.