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Nostalgic Christmas Specials You Can’t Miss

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Growing up, TV Christmas specials were a highlight of the season. They were innocent, cheesy, and oh-so-spectacular. Honestly, who could resist the holiday stylings of the Osmonds or the Carpenters?

Whether it was Donnie & Marie or Karen & Richard, or whether it was Dean Martin, Bing Crosby, Perry Como, or Andy Williams, watching those variety shows always helped make the Christmas season merry and bright.

And how awesome is it that they can be found on YouTube?

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It’s The Most Nostalgic Time of the Year

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This is the time of year nostalgia really begins to develop into a full-fledged obsession, and why shouldn’t it? Christmas is only a little more than a month away, and I’ve got snowflakes, Santa Claus, and silver bells on my mind.

I know, I know, we can’t forget about Thanksgiving, the forgotten holiday. And we shouldn’t, of course, but I gotta say, Thanksgiving doesn’t hold the same nostalgic memories that Christmas does… Perhaps because Christmas is really a full season that dominates the entire month of December with 24-hour Christmas music radio stations, houses covered in lights, and shopping, shopping, shopping.

Okay, so there is one Thanksgiving memory that sticks out—the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. Every year I would get up to watch that spectacle at 7:00 a.m. with my mom, who also loved it. The floats, the marching bands, and those fantastic giant balloons. It’s nostalgic for a lot of people, and we wrote more about it on this post last year (we’ve updated the post with this year’s viewing information). Continue reading “It’s The Most Nostalgic Time of the Year”

12 Nostalgic Days of Christmas: 12 Christmas Wishes {Twelfth Day}

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Merry Christmas Eve! We hope our 12 Days of Christmas series was as enjoyable for you to read as it was for us to create. If you missed a day, the list of every post can be found at the end of this post.

Thank you to everyone who liked and commented on the daily posts and a big thank you to all our new followers since we started the series on December 13. (And once again, thank you to our first 100 followers!)

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2016 was a year filled with change. 2017 promises to be one filled with goals, growth, and gratitude, and what better way to celebrate Christmas and the coming of the new year than sharing a list of 12 Christmas wishes created especially for you, our wonderful readers. We hope you can find some positive, encouraging, and hopeful words here and can use them to create better days today.

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Holiday · Nostalgia

12 Nostalgic Days of Christmas: 11 Classic Christmas Books {Eleventh Day}

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According to recent research by the Pew Research Center:

“[Y]oung adults – those ages 18 to 29 – are more likely than their elders to have read a book in the past 12 months. Fully 80% of young adults read a book, compared with 71% of those ages 30 to 49, 68% of those 50 to 64 and 69% of those 65 and older.”

This holiday season, let’s improve on those statistics. You probably have at least one of these classic Christmas books in your home right now. If not, go get one or more of them from the library or the bookstore. Gather the family. Kids. Mom and Dad. Grandpa and Grandma.

And read. Together. It’s one of the best ways to develop strong family bonds. Combine that with embracing the nostalgia of the season (which also strengthens personal connections and bolsters positive thinking), and you have the makings for a most magical, memorable, merry Christmas.

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Holiday · Media · Nostalgia

12 Nostalgic Days of Christmas: 9 Christmas Movies and a New Way to Think About Them {Ninth Day}

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Everyone and their dog has made a list like this. And they have done so, year after year, after year. Just Google “top holiday movies” or “top Christmas movies.”

Go ahead. I’ll wait.

See? Dozens and dozens of lists just like this one. Some have 10 movies. Some 25 or 50. Some have 100.

I dunno . . . seems like a “Top 100 Christmas Movies” list would cover just about every Christmas movie you could possibly want to watch. One wonders what kind of horribleness your Christmas movie has to be to not make a top 100 list . . .

In any event, you may be asking yourself: why should I read another Christmas movie list? What could The Nostalgia Diaries possibly add to the conversation?

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