Photo: Noah Densmore/Shutterstock

11 Signs You Grew Up Spending the Holidays in Denver

by Tim Wenger Dec 6, 2016

Your holiday light tour always ended at the Denver City & County Building.

And you never quite understood what all the hype was about. I mean, it looks the exact same every single year, why is this causing such a fuss? I’ve seen more originality in a Colorado Rockies trade deal.

As soon as you saw Dealin’ Doug wearing a Santa Hat, you knew it was time to hit Park Meadows.

It seems so much less pretentious than Cherry Creek.

Opening presents at 7 AM represented a morning of sleeping in late.

It felt nice to have a day off from having to beat ski traffic, which of course meant hitting the road at 6:30am.

You rarely had to go anywhere for the holidays, because family from warmer states would come to you in search of a ‘white Christmas.’

They almost always got their wish, and it saved your family a lot of money over the years.

Unless your family is one of the weird ones that hate snow. . .

Maybe it’s time to finally consider moving to Florida. I hear they love transplants, and you’ll get a great price for your house right now.

Either way, you were astonished to learn that the whole world doesn’t look like a scene from Frosty The Snowman in late December.

I frequently wondered about those places that never got snow. What were the holidays like there?

Conversation starters shift from ‘How bout them Broncos?’ with a slight fist pump into ‘HOW BOUT THEM BRONCOS.’

Or complete silence, with the only acknowledgment of camaraderie being a slight nod of the head in passing.

You always had a sneaking suspicion that your math teacher doubled as the Santa Claus at Southglenn Mall.

‘Mom, how did Santa know my name?’ He really does have a list!

But you were excited to learn that the North Pole is actually only about an hour’s drive away.

But it took longer to get there because your dad always wanted to stop on the way for a few beers at the Old Chicago in Colorado Springs.

The entrepreneurial bug in you always thought you could make a lot of money by going to the mountains and cutting down trees, then selling them for less than the road-side stands.

After constantly nagging your parents about this, they finally took you to cut one down. But the business ambitions died after they forced you to help load it into the truck, tie it down, and prime it for use inside a home.

After ten years of receiving mostly outdoors-related gear as presents, you gave up asking for toys and video games.

Sometimes, you’ve just gotta find the fun in snowshoeing.

Discover Matador