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Veteran's Day and an Etiquette Question
2003-12-10 - 11:25 p.m.
Christmas Thoughts - a bit early.. so sue me!
The Christmas holiday has a bit of a bittersweet taste for me. I try really hard to not show it, but while it lightens my heart, it somehow weighs it down a little in the process.
I enjoy the gifts and I enjoy spending time with my "new" family, I love the snow (hopefully) and I love the Christmas story and the decorations, and the kids all a-twitter about Santa Claus and etc.
Then I think about the traditions my family used to have when I was growing up.
The cardboard fireplace (every home *has* to have a fireplace, even if it's a tab a into slot b kind of fireplace.
The open-house type of party that lasted way after I was shooed off to bed. We had people coming and going and dropping off presents and bringing food and talking and laughing.
The decorations. It was my job to help decorate the house. I got to decorate the tree, and set up the snow scene. It was basically nothing more than cotton ball "snow" a santa claus made out of old Reader's Digests (painted red) with a plastic santa head), a fiberfill santa and Mrs. Claus and a small plastic sleigh with a pompon santa and eight tiny reindeer. The sleigh had presents piled in and year after year, they always managed to find their way out of the little sleigh and all over the house.
Later, as I got older, the plastic manger scene I grew up with was replaced by handpainted resin figures (painted by me) and a manger that was made by my father.
But the focal point was the tree. As a small child, it was a live tree (one year, we even planted it in the front yard), after that, it was fresh cut. When I became a teenager, we opted for an artificial tree. The artificial tree was a match-the-stem-color-to-the-trunk-code type of tree, and always had a bald spot.
And there was church, of course. If not ON Christmas eve, a day or two before (depending on when CHristmas fell in the week) we got to hear the story of Baby Jesus. I miss that now. This is really the only time that I miss church. It's my connection to my past, whether I like it or not.
My first Christmas married to my love, my mother bought us a Charlie Brown artificial tree and it was a scraggly little thing and had huge bald spots all over the place. It was the most pitiful tree I've ever seen. We took one look at the thing and then we were off to the tree farm that was only about two miles from the apartment. We found the most beautiful tree and plunked down out tree and took it home. It was beautiful and we worked on that tree, it was bare in places because we didn't have many ornaments, but with all of the white lights, it was just stunning.
Lately, we've been going to my love's parents house for Christmas, so we don't do all of the decorating the like here at home. It's really rather depressing. I really miss the decorations, and the "christmas spirit" that seems to be around when the decorations are up.
Of course, I don't have any of those ornaments or Christmas treasures I talked about earlier. I have no idea where they all went when my mother gave away her house. They're gone now, and I miss them... but it's probably better this way, because seeing them would probably just make the PMS worse.
I want to make some Christmas decorations of our own, and I'd like to see about a very small christmas tree (like a tabletop tree), just so we can say we have one.
Maybe I'll drop a bug in someone's ear... :)
I'm not updating all that frequently these days, as you can tell.. I'm just not really in a writing mood and why write about what everyone's already heard about :-)
Take care and if I don't update between now and Christmas, I hope ya'll have a jolly one and give the fat man a hug for me!
Please don't forget to answer my survey... it's research for a small business idea... all comments appreciated, no reasonable offer refused!!! It won't take five minutes, I PROMISE!
