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Let’s play.

38 Comments

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It’s Christmas.

Consider it your virtual gift to me.

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I’m going with strange. It’s how I roll…

The year was 2015 and it was my first Christmas without my mother. I’m an only child, my father died when I was 15. Losing my mother hit me hard and I was feeling unhinged. Alone. And not at all in the holiday spirit. Decorating the house and hosting my husband’s ungrateful family was more than I could bear…. so I went to a travel agency, told them how much I wanted to spend and asked them to find me something interesting within driving distance.

Which is how we ended up spending Christmas week in the Pocono mountains of Pennsylvania.

We generally like our accommodations out of the way and quiet… and brother, that’s just what we got.

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Welcome to the Pocono Manor Resort. A massive, secluded, surrounded by mountains and rolling hills, giant stone edifice I won’t ever forget.

It was dark and overcast when we arrived. Mountain fog surrounded the grounds and the silence was eerie. No cars in the parking lot, one dim light by the front entrance.

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And while the interior was fully lit and beautifully decorated…

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It was as silent as a tomb.

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A very large tomb.

Built on 3,000 acres in 1902 as a summer vacation residence for wealthy New Yorkers, families lived here for months with no reason to leave. Boasting an 18 hole golf course, tennis courts, a full spa, riding stables, fly fishing pond, indoor and outdoor pools, multiple restaurants, game rooms, library, theater, and it’s very own post office with private zip code… it was a world unto itself.

And when we visited December of 2015?

We literally had the entire building to ourselves.

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No, I’m not kidding. For the first 5 days of our week long stay it was just us … and every time I walked down this hall to our room? I expected to see the twins on tricycles because we were staying at the Poconos version of the Overlook Hotel.

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Yes, there was staff.

Ghostly staff, because you hardly ever saw them.

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We wandered room after room and never encountered a soul.

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Every morning we had breakfast alone, in a room that probably seated 600.

Creepy?

You could say that.

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We sat alone in the theater…

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And watched It’s A Wonderful Life.

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Hoping the lights would come back on when we were through.

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Long, endless, empty hallways with only the sounds of our footsteps for company.

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Ho! Ho! Holy Hell it was bizarre.

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It was a place frozen in time, although it had just undergone a 5 million dollar renovation.

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I never did manage to get a photo of the entire place…

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You couldn’t really, it was too big.

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But it was definitely a magical and quirky way to spend the holiday.

Sadly this amazing place caught fire and sustained substantial damage in 2019.

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(not my pictures)

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It’s been closed since then with various plans to rebuild.

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Horror of all horrors? The latest developer to be interested is the Margaritaville Corporation who want to build a village of tacky housing.

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They say they will “honor the memory” of the Manor but I don’t think plastic palm trees are going to cut it.

😰

Now it’s your turn.

Share a happy, funny or strange Christmas memory with me.

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38 thoughts on “Let’s play.”

  1. Ill go with funny. As a kid growing up in a row home we lived between a quiet family and an overly excited family. Not that walls were thin (these houses were brick with iron doors) it’s that they didn’t have a lot of furniture, wall hangings or carpet so noise travelled more readily. Every Christmas morning my bother and I woke 6amish much to our parents dismay but we as a family before we opened up any gifts would wait for the excitement next door. There was 6 in the Kryzans family total. Kid wise three girls and a boy. You would hear every single family member laugh and get crazy excited about it being Christmas and there would be a rumbling clapping shouting laughing stampede down the steps allowing us to state ” Now it’s Christmas” hace a laugh and open our gifts.

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  4. I’ll go with the commonplace but amusing in retrospect. I’m sure this has happened many times to many people: 5 month old puppy, housebroken but had also been paper-trained. Big live fresh tree, paper wrapped boxes under the tree – Need I say more 😂

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  5. all of my christmas memories are what i’d label “happy and normal” with one exception: when i was in 8th grade, my parents went to a neighbor’s christmas party and left me and my brother home alone. for some reason, i thought it would be a good idea to help myself to my mom’s creme de menthe (she liked grasshopper cocktails and would sometimes let me take a sip). i didn’t know how to make a cocktail, so i poured it over ice and sipped away. let’s just say i’ve never, ever had creme de menthe since. but boy, i sure felt good for a while, and remember playing PONG with my brother until i fell off the couch laughing. good times. 😉

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  6. On Christmas morning, I would wake up and have to run all the way to the other end of the house and upstairs which were by the garage door, to wake up my Sister, then we would both run back to wake up my Parents, all while trying my hardest Not to peek into the Living Room where all the presents were.
    Good thing your Husband was with you while in the hotel. Imagine if you were alone, there. I’m sorry it burned down.

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  7. One Christmas when I was 9, I got scarlet fever and I was miserable. I got this horrible cough too, it hurt so bad to cough and the fever made me feel like I was dying, not to mention being all red and bumpy. My parents celebrated Christmas with my brother because I was asleep suffering through the horrible sickness that year. I think I pretty much slept through the entire week of Christmas and New Year’s. My grandfather would come into my room to check up on me every so often. I do remember him giving me something hot to drink and it tasted really good. Later I found out it was the Mexican version of hot buttered rum (he loved Bacardi, a lot!) and my mom got mad at him for giving it to me.

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  8. It was 1988 and we decided to drive from Atlanta To West Palm Beach to surprise her parents. We had a brand new car so confidence was high. It was single digit cold. but we were optimistic. Then things went south faster than we were. The car began to stall intermittently but we carried on until A Georgia state trooper told us that I-75 was closed at the Florida state line. We, along with a rush hour traffic jam in the middle of the night, headed north in search of a place to sleep. We finally found one about fifty miles back up the road. When we got to our room, the heat wasn’t working and there were no blankets. When I called the front desk they told me the heater would take a while (After we left) to warm up and that they had given out all the extra blankets to people who came earlier and overcrowded the rooms. Fortunately the room had two queen beds, so we stripped everything off of one and piled in for a short winter’s nap. Sometime later, near sunrise, we admitted defeat, tossed the key in the box (We were never charged) and headed home to the one real blessing of this whole misadventure: Our bed was dressed in a brand new set of red Buffalo plaid flannel sheets. We actually laughed a little before we fell asleep (For about ten hours). I won’t be doing that again.

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  10. In 2007 we loaded up our old van with the 2 of us and our young border collie pup and all things prospecting related and left New Hampshire for the gold fields of Arizona.

    We had a wonderful ride out and met so many amazing American people, I say that as there was not one tourist in the mix from another country, all who were there came to do the same thing, which was to find gold.

    He had never been further west/south than his stay in boot camp, out in Texas, and me who had laid down so many miles, back and forth through the US in my rig, never took time to play while in any state. You know all work………

    Christmas Eve was spent with people from CA and Colorado, Oregon, Idaho and I think a couple from GA and one from NC but there were hundreds of us there, but we had come the furthest.

    Did you ever make a meal while sleeping on the dessert floor that you had to share with others, now that required thinking out of the box, lol We were also out on a nasty 7-mile dirt road and the closest town had one tiny store so we either had to travel to Surprise or Prescott AZ for real food shopping as we were out on BLM land pretty close to Apache Nation reservation.

    I ended up making a wonderful array of platters and the pup made so many friends as we dined with these new friends, but the following morning was Christmas, and the winds began to kick up and eventually got to 100 mph destroying our tent so we had to spend the rest of our trip hunkered down in the van, thank goodness we bought one to make the trip even though she was an old Chevy she kept us safe.

    We left shortly after to make our way home to watch our Patriots, who were to travel to AZ in fact for the Superbowl, we should have stayed to cheer them on as we lost miserably after an amazing year.

    So, Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Years were one for the books. We did find lots of gold and made the best of it and returned 3 years latter much more prepared.

    Merry Christmas and by the way we love the Poconos. Mostly 209 into Milford PA for Chicken Croquettes. 🙂

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    1. Wow, gold prospecting is definitely a unique way to spend Christmas… though huddling to stay safe against 100 mph wind? Not so much.
      Our resort was on Rt 314 and to be honest not a very picturesque part of the Poconos. We have a good time wherever we go …. but to be honest I’m in no rush to revisit that area.

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      1. We stayed in a tourist trap when out there with the heart shaped tubs and the racetrack buddies all around when I used to truck out there the 209 was known to truckers as the Ho Chi Men trail as our mirrors clicked on coming rigs very sketchy but when a family member of one of the police chiefs was killed they shut the road down to rigs, it is much prettier in a Miata I would rent 🙂

        Those Santa Anna Winds are no joke and go for days unlike our hurricanes that whip us and leave.

        This was the report from back in 2007 scary for sure.

        The Santa Ana winds are strong, dry winds that blow from the desert to the coast of Southern California, often causing wildfires and low humidity1 In Christmas of 2007, the Santa Ana winds were especially fierce, reaching gusts of up to 100 mph in some areas2 They contributed to the spread of several fires that burned more than 500,000 acres and destroyed over 2,000 homes in Southern California3 The Santa Ana winds are also known as the devil winds, because they can create havoc and chaos in the region1

        Sad to see the place you stayed at burned to the ground. When we spend Christmas week in DC (because all politicians go home lol) we have the places to ourselves except for Asian tourists who also adore the free museums and military tributes.

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      3. A wonderful time to see every nook and cranny motels reasonable I think we stayed in Alexandria VA, we were able to go to the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier even in the pouring rain he never missed a beat as he marched. The Zoo was closed but every other place was open and free. We have no real family, so we love these kinds of trips too.

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  12. I don’t have a similar Christmas memory to share, but the Pocono Manor Resort reminded of the GRAND HOTEL featured in SOMEWHERE IN TIME. I have visited the hotel (not at Christmas time) and seen the movie, and love and recommend both.

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  13. Since the English COVID Christmas debacle/evacuation of two years ago was neither happy, funny, nor strange, I’ll go with last Christmas. We spent Christmas morning climbing sand dunes in Death Valley National Park and watched the sun come up. It was happy and magical and, for us, a unique way to spend the holiday. I aim to repeat it someday in the future.

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