Country Weekly (Dec. 24th 2012)

Blake Shelton remembers final Christmas with his Dad

via Taste of Country

For Blake Shelton and his wife, Miranda Lambert, Christmas 2012 will be tough. Shelton's father, Dick, passed away in January, making this the first holiday season the country crooner will experience without him.

It seems obvious that 'The Voice' coach is ready to celebrate the holidays despite that empty seat at the table, as he released a holiday album and hosted his first-ever Christmas special. Of course, the holiday fun won't stop Shelton from remembering last Christmas, when his dad was in the hospital and the singer prepared to sleep there on Christmas Eve.

“My sister, she has a husband with two kids now, and they were doing their normal Christmas Eve with the kids. And Miranda has a tradition of going out and spending Christmas Eve with her family in Texas, and I normally go down there with her, too. But I said, ‘If it’s OK with everybody, I’m just going to stay up here with Dad,’” Blake explained to Country Weekly. “He got a lot sicker after that, and I think if everybody in the family had known, you couldn’t have fit another person in the hospital room.”

But instead, it was just father and son alone in the room, hanging out and watching TV.

“It ended up being Dad and I on Christmas Eve, sitting in his hospital room and watching 'Dumbest Stuff on Wheels' for about four hours on his little TV there in the room. I wouldn’t trade that night for anything," Shelton said.

"I brought a few gifts for him that people sent with me, so he got to open some things that night," he added. "It was a special night, it really was.”

No doubt, the typically jolly hitmaker will be thinking about his dear old dad quite a bit this holiday season.