This year’s Christmas tree is up and decorated. As I’ve mentioned before, my husband and I like live trees. Actually, I’d be willing to switch to artificial, but he is not. Though he did allow that with the hardwood floors in our new home, we’ll have to be more careful […]
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Changing Patterns of Christmas Shopping
Every year Christmas sneaks up on me. It shouldn’t, I know. It’s always on December 25. But I hate to shop, and so I avoid the stores until I have no choice. I start to moan about it before Halloween, but usually don’t get serious until close to Thanksgiving. Only […]
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My Christmas in California
I only spent one Christmas at my maternal grandparents’ home in Pacific Grove, California. That was in 1965 when I was nine. I seem to recall many Christmases with these grandparents in Klamath Falls, Oregon, where they lived before they moved to Pacific Grove in about 1962. But in fact, […]
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Decorating for Christmas in Our New Home
I’ve started decorating for Christmas, which is the only season for which I do much decorating. By some people’s standards, I do next to no decorating, even for Christmas. This year, for the first time in my life, I have the advantage of having all my Christmas decorations in the […]
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Will Santa Find Me This Year?
I wrote earlier this year (see here and here) about the problems that the United States Postal Service caused my husband and me when the agency assigned us the wrong zip code (which I have called Zip Code B). Over four months after we moved in, these problems continue. This […]
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Deadline: Epiphany, The Twelfth Day of Christmas
In my family growing up, the tradition was to take down the Christmas tree before New Year’s Day. My mother said it was bad luck to keep the tree up any longer. I think her real reason was that she was allergic to evergreens and wanted the scent out of […]
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You Know Your Children Are Grown When . . . [Part VI]
Once again, during the holidays I noticed that my children are now adults, no longer requiring much (though still some) parenting. This year, I realized my children are grown when 1. I sent one of them on a midnight run to pick up the other one at the airport because […]
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First Christmas Away from Home; First Christmas at Home
Christmas 1978 was the first Christmas I spent away from my parents’ home. My husband and I had been married just over a year, and it was my in-laws’ “turn” to have us. There’s an old Hallmark Cards television commercial about a young woman experiencing her first Christmas away from […]
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My Husband’s Second Christmas, and a Reflection on Memory
One of the “treasures” I found last year when I was cleaning out a cupboard was this picture of my husband as a toddler. The photograph was taken at Christmas 1950, when he was about fourteen months old. At that time, he was the only grandchild on both sides of […]
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The Twelve Days of Christmas: Silver Bells Where They Belong
I’ve written several posts about my grandfather’s clock, which my parents kept for many years and which I now have in my home. I forgot to wind the clock before I went on a weekend trip this summer, and it ground to a halt while I was away. The chimes […]
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