Holiday Traditions and Memories of Days of Our Lives

Image Generated using DALL-E-3 on Bing

The holidays are upon us and I am reminded of family traditions. I have always fixed a pan of roast beef hash on Christmas morning(and Thanksgiving) and my daughter gets to open one present(preselected by me) on Christmas Eve.  What Holiday traditions do you have? 

In the late 70s and for many years after that my Aunt watched Days of Our Lives(DOOL), a soap opera which at that time aired on NBC. I began following the stories on it and a few other soaps as a teen. Each generation had it's favorite super couples.  My fav will always be Patch and Kayla.  Each year at Christmas I always think of Tom & Alice Horton from Days of Our Lives and their Christmas tradition.  They would hang ornaments with their family member's names on their Christmas tree during the episode of the soap that aired nearest to Christmas.  MacDonald Carey and Frances Reid played the Hortons and were on the soap opera for many years. So as a genealogist I couldn't help but look for Frances Reid in a census record.  I got her details from FindaGrave and used that to do a search in the 1940 US Federal Census where I found her living in a boarding house with other actors and actresses.  The man she married that same year is also living in the same boarding house.  The entry was even more amusing to me because the person listed just before them had the given name of Horton.  

1940 US Federal Census of New York City, NY, Enum District 31-906 Manhattan Borough Dist. 10 Sheet 1B Line 72.

Link is to the FamilySearch 1940 US Federal Census while the image below is from Ancestry.

I also found a picture of her as a teenager in the 1930 yearbook of Berkley's Anna Head High School.  In looking at some of the Ancestry Indexing there is an error.  The error is probably generated because AI was used to make the index.   She and Phillip divorced in the 1970s but the name it indexed was Tom, the husband of the character she portrayed on Days.