To me, Christmas is about family and memories. I could care less about all the decorating, shopping, seasonal shows and music.
Sure, it was fun when I was a kid, as it is/was for most children, but now I just love having two days off, to be honest. It’s even better when those two days butt up against a weekend and make it four days off in a row.
Sadly, we’re just one day off from that this year, but in 2025, the calendar lines up perfectly. Thanks, Gregorians, whoever you were!
As you read this column, I’ll be with my parents, brother and my two nephews enjoying all of Mom’s great baking, and I’ll probably be eating enough homemade cookies to choke a horse, as the saying goes.
At some point in the day, I will probably bust out the family photo albums and travel through time for a while, as I love to do.
It’s heartwarming to see Christmas Days of the past, with my grandparents and uncles who are now long gone.
I’m reminded how important it is to capture all those happy times with a camera, as the moments and memories tend to fade over time.
It got me thinking about all the Christmas season pictures I’ve made as a photojournalist over the years, both for the now-defunct Barrie Examiner newspaper and for BarrieToday for the past several years.
I took the time recently to dig through my personal archives of my work, and dug out my favourite images of people enjoying the Christmas holidays in Barrie and beyond over the years.
I hope in this gallery of photographs there are family and friends you may recognize and love dearly.
Some of them may have left us, as everyone eventually does, but photos are especially valuable for keeping family memories alive and well.
As a photographer, I can’t say this enough, but please take as many photographs as you can this holiday season when family and friends are together.
And as I like to tell people, half-jokingly, print those pictures like we used to do way back in the 1900s.
They’ll last forever, unlike the fragile and fleeting pixels on a phone screen.
Kevin Lamb is a reporter-photographer at BarrieToday.
