Time to Decorate for Christmas?

 My son and daughter-in-law's cat!

The problem with decorating for Christmas is that we just got over Halloween, says the black cat!!!

And now this? Humans are just plain crazy!

Shifters might tend to agree. Sometimes.

So the big question is--when do you decorate for Christmas if you celebrate the holiday?

One author was saying that she buys a real tree so Thanksgiving is early this year and it might be a little early for setting up a real tree. One year, my folks had a real tree when they were a newly married couple and the tree had termites.

My dad's German grandparents actually had the tradition of setting candles on the tree and lighting them. Fire hazard nightmare, methinks. But it must have been beautiful.

When we lived in Florida (after being from the West Coast, and fir trees were the norm) my parents bought a silver pom-pom tree and had the circular colored lights flashing off it. Think: bell bottoms, hippies, PEACE, yeah, it sort of fit in. It was in pretty sad shape by the time we got rid of it and moved to Oregon and were back to the standard evergreen trees.

Somehow silver trees just didn't look right, but then shopping in Orlando for Christmas in the heat didn't feel very Christmas like either!

Last year I decided to update a little since the tree I had, had a broken topknot since the day I had bought it on sale at Dilliards, and many of the branches had broken slots and so I had to wire them together to hold them up. But it was the most beautiful tree and even after all of that and decorating it, you'd never know it had any major malfunctions.

But my kids complained every year about the tree and how sad it was, and every year, I would say, next year I'd get a new one. So I finally got a  new one with the lights already strung on it. It only comes in 3 parts, which means it's awful unwieldy to lift, but somehow I manage. It's much skimpier than my other tree, not as tall, and though I love it for its ease in putting it together, I still miss my other.

We stood for hours in lines that extended down through a parking garage the day after Christmas to pick up a tree before the store even opened. And women were fighting over them.Viciously.  I'm very quiet, even in a panic situation like that when everyone was scrambling for the half-off decorations. But I really wanted a tree for the next year. Somehow I managed to snag a very harried clerk and he put my number on the first tree I could grab that hadn't already sold, and that was it! Somehow in the packaging of the tree, the top was broken, so the next year that I was able to put it up...I learned the packagers had broken it and had problems. And then for the next 17 years, I struggled to tape and clamp the treetop on top so it would stay on top~!


Isn't this one beautiful? No one could ever tell how wounded it really was. :)

This post is dedicated to the loving memory of a tree bought when the family was all together as one and well loved in another state where both my son and daughter were born and well loved in this one  and two more homes for many many years.

With all things, we must move onward and upward and this past year in front of the new tree, my son and daughter-in-law and daughter and son-in-law all  celebrated maybe the only time that we all will be together again.


Doesn't it look scrawny? But it's the family get togethers that matter the most, and I love my new tree too. :)

Have a super great Saturday!!!

Terry
"Giving new meaning to the term alpha male where fantasy IS reality!"
www.terryspear.com

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