Clark Griswold, Christmas Baghdad-style and other holiday memories from local celebrities
Christmas is the season of giving, the season of family, the season of tradition.
But also, according to Madison Sawyer, traffic reporter for KTVT/Channel 11, it’s the season of Christmas decoration calamities. And when chatting with Evan Anderson, news anchor at KXAS/NBC5, we learned that it’s also the season of figuring out the “truth” about Santa Claus.
In other words, no two Christmas stories are exactly alike. We know. For the fifth year in a row, we asked notable North Texans to tell us their favorite holiday anecdotes.
Some are poignant. Some are funny. They’re all memorable.
Even the no-gift-exchange story that Texas Rangers radio announcer Eric Nadel shared will warm your heart.
Heather Hays
TV news anchor
This was the eighth year of my favorite Christmas tradition. My husband and I and our daughters, who are 9 and 10, host an open-house toy drive at our home for family and friends.
It’s a time for us to get off Facebook, to look everyone face to face, to hug our friends and our neighbors, to have a cup of eggnog and a cookie together, and to tell Santa what you want for the holidays.
We have an official Toys for Tots box in our living room and then, about two weeks before Christmas, we bring in all of the toys that people donated to Toys for Tots.
The girls love doing it, although the first couple of years it was a tough concept for them to grasp. They’d say, “But Mom, I want this toy!” Now, if there’s something they like, they’ll say, “I’ll put that on my list for Santa,” but they’re even more excited about getting that toy in the hands of a child who needs it.
We started doing this when the girls were little, because we want them to understand that this is the season of giving and of giving back, of spreading the love and spreading the joy. Each year, we get about 300 to 400 toy donations. Over the years, that adds up to about 3,000 toys that the girls have donated.
Hays has co-anchored KDFW/Fox 4’s newscasts at 6 and 9 p.m. weeknights for 17 years.
Madison Sawyer
TV traffic reporter
Christmas, for me, means four different things: traditions, faith, family and, of course, a lot of comical moments. Our Christmases were often like scenes straight out of “National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation,” which is probably why, year after year, we watch that movie and laugh until we cry.
I am convinced that Clark Griswold’s character was loosely based on my dad, David Adams.
The Christmas tree scene — where Clark tries to chop down the biggest tree in the forest and strap it onto the family car while the kids are all miserable — was like all the times we visited Christmas tree lots in Fort Worth and complained while my dad took forever picking out what he thought was the perfect tree.
And the scenes where Clark decorates the house with thousands of lights and cannot figure out why the lights will not work, that was so totally written based on the Adams Family Christmases.
We would spend hours stringing the house and setting up elaborate decorations that my dad had handmade and took so much pride in. My sister, my mom and I all vividly remember my dad saying to us, just like Clark does in the movie, “Are you sure that you checked every single light in the box?”
But just like the movie, no matter what went horribly wrong at Christmas, my mom and dad always made it a Christmas to remember for my sister and me.
Sawyer, a Fort Worth native, is the traffic anchor for “CBS 11 News This Morning.”
Terry Fator
Ventriloquist
Here’s how much I enjoy Christmas: I’m the guy who, without fail, puts up the decorations the day after Halloween. For me, it has always been a fun time where I get to be a child and act like a child.
But this past year I got the opportunity to experience Christmas for the first time as an adult. I had no idea that could be so much fun, too.
I don’t have children. Neither does my wife. But we spent the holidays in Atlanta with her family. She has nieces and nephews who are 6, 5 and 2. And on Christmas Eve, all of us adults stayed up till 2 o’clock in the morning assembling the toys for these children.
I’m sure, if the kids were to wake up, they would have wondered why Santa’s elves had such potty mouths. At one point, we were swearing at the top of our lungs when we realized we put the doll house together wrong and that we’d have to take it apart and start over.
But the next morning, getting to seeing Christmas through the eyes of a child, defined Christmas for me in a whole new way. It was the year I finally got to see what Christmas is all about.
Fator, a ventriloquist and Dallas native who won “America’s Got Talent” in 2007, is one of the biggest acts on the Las Vegas Strip, headlining at the Mirage hotel and casino for nine years.
Evan Anderson
TV News Anchor
My favorite childhood memories about Christmas involve the feeling of getting up super early in the morning, filled with anticipation about what would be waiting under the tree. We would always try to go to sleep on Christmas Eve. But it was hard to sleep when we were so excited.
Then we’d get up early, probably at 6 or 7 in the morning, Mom and Dad still in bed, and we’d try to get them going so we could show them everything we got. As you get older, that level of excitement kind of wears off. You’d rather get another hour’s sleep. But some part of you still yearns for that feeling.
As much as I loved the presents on Christmas morning, I figured out the truth about Santa early on. That’s partly because the first house we lived in, until I was 5 or 6, didn’t have a fireplace or a chimney.
So I asked, “How does Santa get in the house?” I was kind of suspicious. My mom told me, “Well, he just walks in through the front door and puts the presents out.” But I wasn’t really buying that.
Funnily enough, for years and years I would have sworn to you that the Tooth Fairy was real. I can’t explain why I figured one out but not the other.
Anderson, a Fort Worth native, is one of the weekend morning and weekday midday anchors for NBC5. He joined KXAS in February.
Linda Gray
Actress
My most memorable Christmas was the year my family and I were invited to spend the holiday with friends in Colorado. Being Southern California people, we were excited to have a White Christmas.
One day, our hosts announced, “OK, there’s this beautiful little restaurant/cottage where they’re preparing dinner for us. The only catch is we have to cross-country ski to get there.”
This news was greeted with a nervous pause from pretty much everyone who didn’t know how to ski. But our hosts assured us, “Don’t worry, when we get the skis, there is a young man who will teach you the basics about cross-country skiing.”
So we go to this little shack, put on our skis, get our lesson and away we go. They told us, “It’s only about a mile.” But when you don’t ski very well, “only a mile” seems like the longest trip ever! Still, it was a beautiful evening — and a gorgeous, winding path. It was like we were going to Grandma’s house.
Then we turned one bend and there was the cottage, with the fireplace going and the lights on. It looked like something on the front of a Christmas card. As we got closer, we could hear a piano playing. And inside we had the most beautiful dinner. Everybody was singing Christmas carols.
Then, at the end of the dinner, we got back on our little skis and went back.
It was the most magical Christmas. The ambiance, the whole charm of it all, was extraordinary.
Gray, an honorary North Texan, starred as Sue Ellen Ewing in the TV series “Dallas.”
Andy and Ashley Williams
Reality TV personalities
Ashley: Our most memorable Christmas was our first one together as a married couple. We weren’t living in the States at that time. We were still serving in the military, stationed in Baghdad. It was special because everyone put in a lot of effort to make it look and feel like Christmas would back home.
Andy: There was a big Christmas tree made out of sandbags and a pole with lights strung up in the shape of a tree. But the lights weren’t too bright. You don’t want certain people to know where you are.
Ashley: Then there was the Christmas meal, prepared by cooks who were more accustomed to making a lot of curry and food specific to the region trying to make a traditional American Christmas dinner. They didn’t get it exactly right, but it was so sweet that they made the effort.
Andy: Now we’re concentrating on trying to create our own Christmas family traditions here in Fort Worth — all the while never forgetting and always grateful for the men and women who are still over there, making sacrifices for all of us here.
Andy and Ashley Williams are the house-flipping stars of HGTV’s “Flip or Flop Fort Worth.”
Stephanie Hollman
Reality TV personality
My favorite Christmas tradition — I do it every year with my kids — goes back a couple of generations.
On Christmas Eve, we do a campout in the living room. We snuggle up in blankets, we watch Christmas movies and we wait for Santa. Or at least we stay awake as long as we can. Santa always seems to show up after the boys fall asleep. Imagine that!
Then my husband and I help Santa get the presents out and we set the house up for the boys to wake up to a magical Christmas.
I do this for my boys, because my parents did it for me when I was a kid and it was always so fun. And my mom says her mom and dad did this for her when she was little.
One of the best things about being a parent is re-creating for your children what you loved as a kid.
Hollman is one of the stars of the reality series “The Real Housewives of Dallas.”
Melissa Rycroft
TV news host
My best Christmas was when I was about 12 years old and we went to go visit my grandparents in Chicago. It was the first time I had ever seen snow, my first White Christmas, so I got to do everything that you hear about in the songs.
I made my Frosty the Snowman. We had snowball fights. On Christmas Eve, we piled into the car and drove around all the little suburbs of Chicago and looked at Christmas lights, all the houses with snow on the roofs.
I remember thinking that it was so cool, because it was always how I had envisioned Christmas. From all the songs and all the books that you read as a kid, it’s a snow time. But growing up in Dallas, I had never gotten to experience a White Christmas until that year.
Rycroft, a Dallas native and “Dancing With the Stars” winner, is co-host of “Morning Dose,” a syndicated morning news show airing from 5 to 8 a.m. weekdays on KDAF/Channel 33.
Jewel
Singer and actress
I grew in a family that always exchanged homemade gifts. That was something that I cherish about my childhood: Instead of going out to the department store one day and buying a bunch of presents, we would spend weeks making something or drawing something.
It was always fun and challenging to come up with something great. But inevitably all of the gifts that we made ourselves turned out to be more personal and more meaningful than department-store presents.
We have more money at our disposal now than we did then. We can buy whatever we need. But the way we see it, the handmade stuff is priceless.
Jewel, a former North Texan who lived on a ranch in Stephenville, is a Grammy-winning recording artist and the star of Hallmark Channel’s “Fixer-Upper Mysteries.”
Eric Nadel
Sports radio announcer
Our new family tradition grew out of a practice my sister and I started several years ago. Since we are both very blessed with material things, we decided not to get each other birthday presents. Instead, we make a charitable donation in each other’s honor on our birthdays.
I got the idea to do this at Christmas, too, when I realized how little everyone in our family needed any of the gifts we received. Once all the kids were grown up, I casually suggested that maybe it’s something we all should consider doing, and my wife and her two sisters all agreed.
So instead of gift-giving, everyone makes a donation to a nonprofit and explains to the rest of the family why they chose their particular cause. We have been doing this for three years.
It’s interesting to see how everyone chooses to donate. And it’s a wonderful reminder for all of us that the season is about giving and about sharing, not about materialism and the accumulation of things.
I have not tried to convince anyone else to celebrate Christmas this way. But if anyone else wants to try it our way, they might find it as rewarding or more so than the way they are doing it now.
Nadel is the longtime radio play-by-play and color announcer for the Texas Rangers. He joined the broadcast team in 1979 and has been the team’s lead radio voice for 23 years.
This story was originally published December 21, 2017 at 9:37 AM with the headline "Clark Griswold, Christmas Baghdad-style and other holiday memories from local celebrities."