Christmas...

I was talking yesterday about Christmas at my Grandma’s house and the memories that I will have forever the memories that will stay with me and no one can take them away.

Some of the memories are quite vague but I love them none the less. Some of them I know that I have created from looking at pictures of Christmas’ past but others were never in pictures they are only in the fading memories that I force myself to try and remember to keep them from completely fading out.

Christmas at my Grandma’s  always meant that the five of us would all have matching pajamas, but this could have been for anytime of the year. They were always homemade and I can remember being called away from playing for Grandma to measure a piece of elastic for the shorts that she would then write our name on the end in a fine point sharpie before letting us go back to playing. One set in particular is memorialized in a picture of me and two of my cousins standing in front of the refrigerator with those pink spongie curlers in my hair. Now I realize that my hair is much too fine to hold curls of any sort no matter how much hair product is in my hair and how much heat is applied. I know that in the office closet at their house there is a suitcase full of that material, pink with small white strips in a soft stretchy material as well as yellow and white that my cousin Jody had. I was always jealous of him, I wanted the yellow pajamas more than anything.

Everyone in our family has a stocking that Grandma handmade. One of those felt pieced together kits that you can buy at the craft store. All are different. There is resentment too. I wanted the one that was a train made out of candy…I got a green one with Raggedy Anne and Andy, the same one Jody has. I want a candy train. They have been in multiple rooms and they always had the best presents. They were in the office for the longest time. Then pinned to the curtains in the dining room, and then onto the breezeway curtains. Now they are wrapped in tissue paper in white shirt boxes in the office closet. I haven’t gotten up the nerve to ask for mine. I’m not sure if I can handle having it in my own home. It makes me sad because I know that once it leaves their house it will be over. That those memories of childhood will finally end. That it will mean that we won’t be spending hours and hours piled into the tiny rooms of their house waiting, being forced out of the house to play with something anything.  

When we were little and everyone was there wasn’t enough room for everyone to sleep in the house so there were a few times that we would sleep in the garage. Now let me finish! This garage had wall to wall carpet, a Dearborn heater that we would all sleep in front of.  They would put blankets down across the door so that there were no drafts. My grandparents would  bring in the redwood picnic table and we would eat out there and play games and have fun. I remember many times sitting at the picnic table playing Monopoly and not being old enough to play by myself and being on a team with my cousin Jeffrey and being the horse. I remember that no matter how much we played we never won.  

I don’t remember whether or not the tree was out there or if it was in the living room in the house. I remember playing with our toys out there and how much fun it was.

That room has since been enclosed and turned into a room with a heat/cool unit and a bathroom. It doesn’t feel the same. 

The memories don’t feel the same. 

love ya!

Christmas traditions...

I am going to try this since it is the holiday season once again and that means that I am probably going to be limited in the amount of time that I am able to blog. I know that really isn’t an excuse not to blog because if I really wanted to I could make the time to pound out a post every now and then but I just can’t make myself. Today at church we were talking about Christmas traditions and it has really been making me think about what I really remember and look/looked forward to at Christmas.

I have always liked the way that Christmas lights look when the windows are all speckled with raindrops and it just gives the lights a beautiful blurry effect.  The way that they look in photos is always fun and I’m not talking about fancy high speed digital cameras, I’m talking the old school point and shoot cameras that you would have to rewind the film and drop it off at Wal-Mart and come back two weeks later to see your pictures photos. I don’t really care about putting them on the tree or wrapping them in bushes because you just end up freezing in the dark trying to figure out which one isn’t working and causing the complete failure of all your hard work.

I like holiday displays. My favorite is on the south end of a double dead end street in my home town.  (It is on both sides of the main street in our town and they both dead end.) Each of the houses on that block have painted wooden cutouts of cartoon characters in Christmas settings. When I say cutouts I mean there are six or seven per house and on the other side where there are no houses are cutouts of train cars with the matching characters. I think that when a person on the street leaves that the cutouts are gifted to the new homeowners. I am not completely sure because it has been a long time since I  have been down that street at Christmas since it is a dead end it makes it hard to justify going down the street.

One thing that I truly miss about Christmas is the time that I would get to spend with my cousins. When we were little, they lived in South Dakota so it was a big deal when they would come down. It is a ten or twelve hour drive to where we live in Texas and it could be even more I don’t really remember, I only made the trip one time. When we were little there were so many things that I loved about Christmas at Grandma’s, which really is a whole post in itself.

I guess back them it was more that I guess I really didn’t understand the concept of time. Today I am more aware of how little time there is in life and how short twenty-four hours actually is. I know that there are way too many days when twenty-fours in one day just isn’t enough for me to accomplish everything that I need to and this is one of them. Because it then becomes a fight to balance what you have to do in your daily life with those little things that make it all worth living. There are a lot of days when I would really just rather snuggle up on the couch with my husband at night and watch endless hours of Golden Girls reruns and eat jell-o instead of going upstairs to fold laundry or in the kitchen to wash the never ending supply of dirty dishes that find their way into my sink.

Even now as I sit here I know that there are so many other things that I should be doing right now. There are Christmas presents that still need to be wrapped. I need to find a place to put my Christmas tree up so that I can put the gifts under there. I also have to finish my mother-in-law’s present which is on the dining room table half finished. I know that I’ve got to get my stuff together so I can pull out the three sacks of my brother’s t-shirts so that I can start cutting them apart to make him a blanket for graduation. I am hoping that I can make it a little extra special.

love ya!

The holiday season...

The holiday season is upon us which only means one thing...cold. Yes it is cold here in Texas we are looking at our first freeze warning tonight. Yes that stinks much more than anything else that is going on and there are lots of things going on right now. I really just don't know what to do right now. I really need to get up and clean but so much of my body is warmed by the couch that if I get up my backside will be quite cold. I had hoped to get my house cleaned before the Thanksgiving holiday and well that didn't happen. Many of my goals have not been lately and it does upset me but I know that I just have to keep working on it and things will finally work out. I know that right now I really should be doing the dishes but I just don't feel like sticking my hands in a sink full of hot soapy water right before I have to go. My lips are already so chapped that even putting any kind of chapstick on them just makes them all slippery and slimy and does nothing to soothe. 

I have two different piles of Christmas gifts that I need to start wrapping but I really haven't gotten to that point because I have to sit on the dirty floor which is also cold and hard. So right now I think that I should probably just stop complaining and get things done around my house. Anyone want to help? I also need to do laundry and I need someone to dust up around the ceiling and underneath my bed. Then they need to find the floor in my spare bedroom as well as get the bed cleaned off. 

love ya!