Twenty years ago, Katelyn Colombrito threw one arm around her 2-year-old brother, Ryan, while pulling her two cousins in close with her other. They wore matching red pajamas that Christmas Eve, sitting together on their grandmother’s big leather couch as a camera captured the moment: four kids, forever, ready for Christmas.
That 2004 photo began a holiday tradition. Every 10 years, the family re-creates it.
The cousins grew up together in Chesapeake, and a week rarely passed when they didn’t see each other and play. Their parents still live there.
In the first Christmas Eve picture, Ryan Colombrito held a cup that partially hid his face.
“I don’t really remember it all that much, but, like, I remember the vibe,” said Colombrito, now a senior at Virginia Tech. It was a good “vibe” that year when Katelyn was 6 and cousins Andrew and Emily Saintsing were 5 and 3.
In 2014, his mom, Kelly Colombrito, and his cousins’ stepmother, Jennifer Saintsing, decided re-creating the picture would make a great gift for the grandparents. They set it up and ended up submitting a copy to The Pilot for a story. The grandparents received copies of the newspaper with the family portrait.