I blinked. Suddenly, we’re less than a month from the END of 2024. We’ve passed Thanksgiving and are speeding toward Christmas. And then, just a few days later, it’ll be the year 2025.
2025! It sounds like a pop song from my high school years that asked whether man will still be alive. But I realized THAT year was 2525 so we still have time. Whatever! 2025 does sound so futuristic as to be unreal. In the movie Back to the Future, they traveled to 2015. Hell, that’s nearly history now. But I digress…
Aside from the theme I often mention on this site, how damn fast time is flying, I can’t believe the “holiday season” began again already.
It starts with that turkey dinner. Early in our marriage, in the first household we established together, we invited my parents to Thanksgiving dinner. I don’t why (other than Randy has a tendency to think bigger is better in just about every instance), but I think the turkey was about 25 pounds for the 4 of us. Which meant that Randy and I ate turkey every day for about a week after that. We ate sandwiches, soup, turkey pot pie, reheated Thanksgiving dinners, and even a turkey omelet.
Here’s a word of advice. Don’t eat turkey omelet. Thank goodness we learned that lesson in the first year of our marriage.
My mom always made a big deal out of the holidays. But then, my mom has always been the poster child for moms. She slowing down a bit now that she’s 90, but she always enjoyed everything about home making and mothering. And she is very, very good at those things. She set a good example which I failed to follow.
I hate to admit it, but I’m kind of bah-humbug about Christmas. I never did much like all the hullabaloo that surrounds the holidays. That probably has a lot to do with having never had kids. But it also has a lot to do with laziness, and my obsession with living a simple life. At its core, Christmas is a birthday, and we celebrate birthdays on the day of. “The Holidays” in the United States have evolved to be so much work and so stressful that I basically turned them off a long time ago.
There were a few years, early in our marriage, when we had tons of Christmas decorations. But moving so often (I once counted that we moved 15 times in the first 23 years) cured me of the desire to move, store, unpack, and repack all that stuff for less than 6 weeks a year.
I most look forward to the eating of the season and that’s a sorry statement about me. I don’t usually make many homemade holiday treats (too lazy!) However, last year we decided, sort of at the last minute, to take a road trip to see our great-niece and 2 great-nephews. And I couldn’t go empty handed now, could I? We’re the closest thing those 3 kids have to grandparents, and I had to play the role to the hilt.
I spent three days in the kitchen and produced about 8 kinds of cookies and candy. I made gift bags and boxes, and the whole family got plenty of holiday sweets from their pseudo-grandparents. But I still had about half of everything I made left. I guess some of Randy’s bigger is better must have worn off on my over the years.
Those kids live about 8 hours from here and by the time we are at their house we are almost halfway back to the Lake of the Ozarks. I was glad to bring all the extra stuff I’d made on the road trip which we extended to include Missouri to spend both Christmas and New Year’s with Lynn and Dave, our closest family and best friends. It’s great to be with them, especially during the holidays. But it’s cold up there and I probably won’t ever do that to my nice Florida acclimated body again.
The other thing I like about the holidays is the lights. I had a bit of an unexpected and unusual surge of holiday spirit just after Thanksgiving last week. We found a set of solar lights we bought a couple of years ago to hang in the lanai. I trekked over to Home Depot and got a bunch of those Command Strip hangers for Christmas lights. Randy and I worked together to put them around the lanai cage frame and hang the lights. They were wimpy, wimpy, wimpy. And they lasted about 3 days. So, on one of my trips to Walmart I bought another set of brightly colored LED lights to replace them. Since the clips were already up, the new lights took a very short time to hang. They are awesome!
Bright, colored lights are so festive and really make me happy. In fact, my favorite things about the holidays are the lights in all shapes, sizes, and configurations. This year Randy put up strands of lights in the shape of a Christmas tree (he wanted only white so I made a concession) in the front yard.
Last spring while Lynn was here, she found a snowflake generator for 10 bucks at a garage sale and gifted it to Randy. I love that snowflake generator since that is the ONLY kind of snow I like. They’re perfect in Florida and also make me happier than I thought I could be about snow.
I will make the effort to have two Christmas trees this year. The one in the house is a small ceramic tree I asked my mother-in-law to will to me. It’s full of colored lights that raise my spirits every time I look at it. The other is a grouping of 3 pygmy palms just outside our pool cage that I wrap with lights and can see from the living room.
Years ago, when the retail industry was kicking Christmas out in favor of “Happy Holidays”, I decided to kick retail out of our Christmas. We don’t do gifts and that’s taken the most stress out of this time of year for me. Instead, if we find things that are perfect for people throughout the year, they get a gift when we find it.
I know a lot of you will be appalled that my lack of enthusiasm doesn’ match the cultural norm for this time of year, but it gives me the greatest “peace on earth” I can imagine. And that works just fine for me.
P.S. It’s been cold here. So cold the National Weather Service issued a “Falling Iguana Alert” last night. On Friday I’ll tell you just what that means.
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