Bourbon and milk with a dash of nutmeg on top is Marie Martin’s favorite Christmas drink, though on Tuesday night she was sipping on a martini.

Sitting in a chair, surrounded by family in her water-view Kenmore house, the life-long Seattle-area resident turned 100 years old.

Massive paintings hang from the walls, all of them carefully drawn up and filled in by her masterful fingers. Martin has been an artists ever since the day her then 22-year-old godfather showed her the ropes in 1922.

“He put the paint brush in my hand, and showed me, and I fell in love right away,” she said.

Her paintings can be found all over Kenmore, from friends houses to the Inglemoor Golf Club, where she used to spend much of her time and was even a golf club captain in 1958.

Martin grew up north of Ballard, when the city line only extended to Northwest 85th Street. Living north of that line, she remembers when her address was listed as Everett.

Later, she and her father moved onto a house boat and attended a kindergarten where she made one of her earliest memories during a rare Seattle snow storm.

“When it snowed in Seattle, my father put me up on his back and walked me to school,” she said.

A love of water kept Martin in the area, particularly a love of swimming. When she was four years old, her father put her in a life preserver and set her in the water. She said her arms instantly shot out, and she started paddling the instant she hit the water.

“I just loved it, and I always have,” she said.

Later, she would go on to attend Cascade Grade School and Broadway High School, where she met her husband, Ken as a sophomore.

Martin said she was dating one of Ken’s friends and neighbors, Jim, at the time, and after school she would see both of them. After she and Jim broke up, her and Ken bumped into each other again three years later.

“Ken happened to be there (the Everstate Dance Club) at the same time, and we danced,” she said. “Ken said, ‘I have a feeling I’ll see you again.’”

He did, and eventually they were married in 1936, during the height of the Great Depression.

Matin loves cats, including Beaujolais, her current cat, but a smile crossed her face as she remembered her favorite one, Gummy.

Her husband was working in the garden when they noticed a sign for kittens in the neighborhood. She asked Ken about getting one, and she said she can still remember the way he shook his head. Needless to say, they ended up with Gummy, who was a Siamese, and whose color Ken thought looked like a gray piece of gum.

Ken and Marie moved to their house in Kenmore in 1970, where they made a life for themselves.

“She’s been putting up with us for 100 years,” her grandson, Brian Martin, said.

And as she took another sip of her martini, she cracked another smile.

“Hey listen, I ain’t over yet.”