The sun is among the missing again. It is a bit colder than it has been, down to 34˚. I guess the big chill is headed this way so we need to brace ourselves. I can already feel the breeze from the dog door so the back door will have to stay shut. Gracie won’t mind as she doesn’t like being out in the cold too long. She hasn’t a lot of fur. She prefers lying on the couch on her afghan while the heat blasts keeping all of us warm. Nothing dumb about dogs!

I am slow to start this year. Usually my house is already beginning to look a lot like Christmas. My sisters have their trees up and one sister is just about done decorating while the other is well along. I’ll start this week and do a bit each day. My back better hold up for the duration. I love when the house is filled with Christmas.

When I was a kid, our decorations were a bit worse for wear. Many of them were cardboard Santas and snowmen we always put on the windows near the stenciled white snowflakes. Many ornaments were plastic though the best of them was glass. I have several of the small glass ornaments as my mother gave each of us a bag of them for our trees. They take the longest to hang as I hold each one for a while and let the memories of those long ago Christmas seasons wash over me.

Our trees were never showcases. There were bare spots where there should have been more branches. We used to put Christmas cards inside near the trunk in the spaces. I also remember a Coca-Cola Santa who had a prime spot in the middle. The tinsel was silver and my mother always put it on the tree. She was into draping it from branch to branch. The icicles were the old lead ones which hung so well from their own weight. They never stuck to our clothes the way the new ones do. My mother was right. The icicles always looked better hung individually than flung on in piles, our method for putting them on the tree.

I think we always had the prettiest, most colorful trees. Bare spots went unnoticed. We just saw the lights, the ornaments and the icicles hanging off branches and shimmering with reflective colors. My mother would put a few wrapped presents under the tree. We aways knew they were the pajamas.

We could hardly wait until it got dark. We’d run and turn the bulbs on in the orange window candle lights, and one of us would turn on the outside lights then we’d plug in the tree. Every night we were in awe when the lights came on because the tree was magnificent.