Today is Christmas Eve Eve.

The sun is among the missing but could appear later. I see glimpses of blue. The high today will be 30° which is, I suppose, warm in comparison to the last few days. I have a concert, the last Christmas concert, this afternoon.

We have a little snow from the other day and from a dusting last night. It will never melt. I take baby steps anytime I go outside because the walk and deck are covered in ice, craggy ice which crunches underfoot.

When I was a kid, Christmas brought wonder and joy. It touched every sense. I remember walking down the stairs in the mornings and smelling the tree, the sweetness of the pine. The tree’s aroma filled all of downstairs and even gave upstairs the hint of pine.

Colored lights were everywhere breaking through the winter darkness. The more lights the greater the delight. Every car ride was a light ride. Our tree lit up the living room. The orange window lights shined on the snow when we had a white Christmas. Our living room with just the tree lights lit was awe filled.

The kitchen smelled of cookies baking. The traditional cookie was always the sugar cookie. We got to roll the dough, press in the cookie cutters and finally decorate the cookies. My mother would put a vinyl tablecloth on the table, the better to contain the mess. Bowls of white, green and red frosting were front and center on the table. Colored sprinkles were in bowls on the table. We were traditionalists. Santa wore red, the angel was white and the tree was green. I used a toothpick to dot the trees with colored lights of frosting. Every cookie was a masterpiece.

My mother had a hi-fi. Back then, some stores and companies sold Christmas records so my mother bought a few and played them on the hi-fi. One of the albums was from Grants and a couple were from Firestone. They were the soundtracks for our cookie making. I have those albums, and I have a turntable so I get to hear them again. In my car, I have been listening to Christmas carols since after Thanksgiving. Their season is so short I never tire of them.

I’d walk by the tree and run my hand up and down a branch. The needles got sharp and would sometimes prick my fingers. My hand would smell like pine. I remember Christmas cards with a felted Santa’s suit and sometimes a felted bag. I remember rubbing the cards. They often went on the tree.

I still love being surrounded by Christmas.

Right now it is 20°. We have snow showers. Last night was even colder, down to the teens. What was frozen is still frozen. The birds are at the feeders. When I filled those feeders yesterday, I had to walk across the frozen deck. I went ever so slowly. For the rest of the day, I was a sloth.

Every morning my Alexa wakes me up at 9:30 with a cheery good morning. She tells me the time, even though it is the same every day. She tells me the weather, the high and the low, for the day. She gives me a random fact. Most mornings I then get out of bed. Alexa does her job well.

In Ghana I didn’t have an alarm clock. I had my students. Every morning was filled with sounds. They cleaned the school compound before their morning bucket baths and before their classes. I could hear the swish of the hand brooms as they tidied the ground. The brooms were short and made from grass. You had to bend over to use one. It was the sweeping outside my window which usually woke me up. My students kept my dirt tidy. I could hear chatting though I didn’t know what my students were saying as they spoke to one another in their own languages. Students stood in line for their bucket baths. I could hear the sound of the water when it first hit the metal buckets. That was the last morning ritual.

I love walking around inside my house with all the lights lit. The tree in the living room is my favorite. It does have a dark spot because I couldn’t put the star on the top of the tree, but that’s no nevermind. The scrub pine tree in the dining room has one of the old plastic Santas and an old candolier with three orange bulbs on the floor in front of it. They are two of my favorite decorations. Both of them bring me back to Christmas when I was a kid.

I remember each of the two windows flanking the picture window had a plastic candle with fake plastic candle drippings. The picture window had a five candle candolier. All the candles had orange bulbs. It seemed every house had orange bulbs in the windows. My sister thinks that the orange makes the light look like a flame. I think she’s right. The candoliers were in a plug difficult to reach so we turned the candles on and off by twisting the bulbs. On was easy. Off was not so easy as the bulbs were hot. We used to lick our fingers first so we wouldn’t get burnt.

I remember it was a race to the windows to turn on the bulbs. The race was a bit slower to turn them off.