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!