Thanksgiving Day +1

I just re-read yesterday's entry..... I must say, I get so sappy on the holidays. And again, I was tempted to delete half of last night's writing. But that's not fair, not the way to do this. My intent when I started this whole thing was to just sit here and type, and whatever came out was out and that's that. I don't edit these entries, but I do check for spelling and grammatical errors, because I detest both.

It just amazes me that here I sit, at 54 years of age, and I can still get teary-eyed about my mother leaving my dad in 1961. It just seems ridiculous to me..... they both eventually re-married, both to spouses who were so different from anyone else in our family, and it seemed to me (and to everyone else) that they were both very unhappy with their second marriages. Now, their spouses have passed away, and they both live alone. My dad is in an assisted-living facility in New Jersey--- not that he needs that type of assistance, but that's where his wife's side of the family put him and unless someone from NY goes to get him, he'll be in New Jersey till his last day on this earth. As for my mother, I don't know exactly where she is because she doesn't keep in touch. She won't give me her address or phone number because she thinks the first thing I will do with that information is pass it along to my dad and his family. Why she thinks she is the center of their universe is just beyond me.

I have to just keep in mind that everything that happened with our family, with our life, is just that-- what happened. And all of those events took me to this place, right here, right now, at this very moment. Without all of that past history, I would not now be in southeast Texas sitting in front of this laptop and typing these words. And I will be the first to admit that my life now is a good one, a great one, a blessed one. As I said last night--- I have much to be thankful for.

Anyway....... this day is like yesterday: sunny and warm and bright and beautiful. My husband and I went to the Christmas tree tent on Highway 3 this afternoon and picked out a tree for the living room. I usually don't go tree shopping with my husband, for the simple reason that his mission in the past has always been to buy the biggest, tallest, fullest tree that he can find. With that in mind, he looks at every single tree, and I usually get bleary-eyed after the ninth or tenth one.

Being that we're not having a big Christmas party this year, and considering that we'd like to spend some time up at the lake, we decided on a much smaller tree: seven or eight feet tall. So off we went, and that's just what we came home with, after looking at just about a dozen trees--- a Noble Fir, approximately eight feet high. Usually, the tree-guy lets my husband use his truck to bring the tree home, and then we need neighbors to help haul in the tree and get it set up into the very heavy, perfectly sturdy, cat-proof solid-steel tree stand.

Not so with this tree-- it was "a piece of cake," as the saying goes. The naked tree is upright now in its tree stand in the living room. We're letting it breathe, and allowing the branches to rest a bit before my husband begins attaching the strands of vintage Christmas lights. That's his job to do.... which can take from six hours to two days, depending on the size of the tree. The vintage lights are tempermental, to say the least, but my husband loves them and enjoys working with them.

Once the lights are all on and in working order, then I start with the ornaments. Two years ago, as I removed all of the tree ornaments, I packed them away separately--- glass ones all in separate boxes, Lenox ones all together, sequined and beaded ones all by themselves. It was so much easier that way, rather than going through each box looking for certain ones for particular trees. As organized as I know I can be, I have to wonder why I didn't think of doing that long ago. Actually, it could be that our trees were always so blessed huge that every ornament we had in the house went on those trees. We had one tree a few years ago that was 14 feet high and was so wide around at the base that nine adults stood around it, all holding hands like the little "Whos" in Dr. Seuss' Whoville in "The Grinch." We had to set that tree up in the very center of our living room because it was much to wide to put in any of the corners of the room. Our friends called it a Christmas forest instead of a Christmas tree.

Today is the 24th...... and with the tree here, the Christmas season has officially begun in this house. One month from today will be Christmas Eve....... and the day after that, we'll be having Christmas dinner in our dining room. It all just goes so fast.

I think I'll stop typing now, before I start to get sappy again.