Even before I enjoyed Thanksgiving last week, I was already planning and plotting my ideas for decorating for the Christmas season, my favorite time of the year! I was somewhat melancholy when I realized that I was shorted a week this year to get my house decorated, gifts bought, menu planned and groceries gathered for the feast. Thanksgiving came a week later this year and that decreased my time for doing some of my favorite things.
I don’t like to dress and trim my space with Christmas until after Thanksgiving. I want pumpkins, scarecrows and cornstalks sitting to embellish my spaces before the red and greens and golds are displayed. I believe we as a society don’t give enough homage to the holiday of thankfulness. The time seems to get lost somewhere between Halloween and Christmas. And this year we lost that “get ready” week.
I had some of my grandsons lined up to come to my “ornamentation” party the day after Thanksgiving. All my decorations were stored upstairs in my little attic spaces and I needed help to bring them all downstairs. I can tell that I am aging because all the time I am adorning all the blank spaces, I am thinking inside my head, “I have to take all this stuff down.”
When my children were small, we used to decorate seven or eight trees inside our house and had the colors of the holiday on every mantel, table and blank surface of our house. Everyone had a tree in their rooms and several outside in our yard. I won the Christmas decorating contest several years running, years ago. Now I am not as industrious.
When my little girl, Pam, was growing up, she aways volunteered me to bring the class Christmas tree to her school. At that time, we didn’t have all the Christmas tree farms or cut commercial trees standing at every corner, so I had to go somewhere out in the country and cut the tree. My sister’s child was in the same classroom as Pam, and one year she and I had the opportunity to cut and bring the tree to school.
We drove several miles out of town to where there were not too many houses and began to assess all the little green cedar trees along the roadside. We found several, but the trunks were quite large and we passed them by. After an hour of searching, we came upon the perfect little Christmas tree growing alongside a hill and we stopped, got our axe from the trunk and climbed up to the model tree. Number one, we didn’t need an axe, we needed a saw. Number two, the trunk of the sapling was quite thick. We hacked and chipped away at the bark for a few minutes and when we realized we were making no progress, my sister jumped into the middle of the tree and “rode” it to the ground and I chopped.
The tree was bigger than we had thought and it would not fit in the trunk of my small car, so we opened the sunroof and let it stick out and blow in the wind for the eight or 10 miles we had to carry it back to the school. Yes, it was fairly cold that day. That was our last tree-chopping adventure.
Oh, my goodness, these are some wonderful memories that I ponder on every holiday season and praise God He has let me keep these treasured recollections and puts them foremost in my mind’s eye each Christmas season.
Make some memories this year. I think we are going to do something totally different with our gift giving this year, something fun that will make new memories. Nothing is wrong with the remembered, treasured past holiday season memories and I want this kind of legacy left for my offspring.
I made the following as one of my sides for Thanksgiving: Broccoli rice and cheese casserole
16 ounces of frozen broccoli
3 T. butter
1/2 cup chopped onion
1 cup of chopped Velveeta cheese
1 can chicken soup
2 cups cooked rice
Saute’ the onion in the butter and add cheese, chicken soup, broccoli and rice and stir until the cheese is melted and mixture is heated through.
Bake until bubbly at 350 degrees. You can serve this now or refrigerate and reheat at 350 degrees for about 20 minutes.
