Does Santa wear shorts?

As of this afternoon, all of the Christmas decorations are out of the closet and in every room of this house. I thought I was done a couple of days ago.... I hadn't put up the vintage silver tree, and I had decided that enough was enough and the living room really didn't need a third table-top tree. I talked myself out of that silver tree. However, the tea-table inbetween my two angel chairs was screaming out for something, and the brass-branched tree holding glass candy canes and gold reindeer just wasn't up for that kind of screaming.

The brass tree is now in the upstairs hallway, looking very elegant-- more so than it did downstairs in the living room. Out from the closet came the silver aluminum tree..... out came the box of vintage glass ornaments I always put on that particular tree. The tea-table which holds it now looks complete, and the angel chairs (circa 1930, with angel-brocade fabric) are now breathing a sigh of relief. Well, finally! She's got her act together!

Actually, even my husband thought I was a little "off" when I told him I wasn't going to put up the silver tree this year. But why not? That tree has a story to it! The story being that we found it on a very hot July day a bunch of years ago, in a barely air-conditioned resale shop in Texas City. The saleswoman was driving us a bit crazy because all the while we were looking in that store, she followed us around and just talked and talked and talked. I have no idea what she said because I tuned her out after the first five minutes. We were about to leave (my husband having given me "the eye" that he'd had enough of her twang-y chatter) and we saw that vintage aluminum tree and the color-wheel that went with it. I hadn't seen one of those in a shop ever, at that point, and the only one I remembered as a child was in my Aunt Jaye's living room back in NY. My aunt liked it because it didn't drop leaves like a real tree. The rest of the family thought anything but a real green tree was just sacrilege. But Aunt Jaye was (and still is) over-the-top with everything.

My husband and I bought that silver tree that day... along with the color-wheel.... for just $45 or something crazy like that. The saleswoman just kept talking and talking and I kept asking her "Is that your best price?" and she kept giving me $3 and $5 discounts till it was just a ridiculous price. I had intended to sell both the tree and the color-wheel at my own shop, but when I put that silver tree together, it just reminded me of the tree in Aunt Jaye's 1950s living room, and I even have a photo of me and my cousin T standing in front of that tree when we were five years old. I wanted to keep the tree... my husband didn't like it and wanted me to sell it.

We compromised. Sort of. I did sell the color-wheel (which I didn't want anyway), and I sold it for more than what we paid for both the tree and the wheel. That first Christmas with the silver tree, everyone who came to our holiday party wanted their pictures taken in front of that vintage aluminum tree. It became the talk of that party because a lot of people down here had never seen a silver tree before. I guess those trees were city-trees. The tree has been with us ever since, either in the dining room or the living room... and with all those sparkling silver branches and all those colorful glass ornaments, none of our cats have ever bothered it. And to think that this year, someone didn't want to put it up.....

With the inside of this house looking like a store-wide Christmas display, the weather outside has been Spring-fantastic. Some of the rose bushes are in their second blooming, the birds are splashing in the bird-baths every morning, and the hens are squawking their chicken-hearts out after they've laid their eggs. Surely, this is not exactly Santa-weather. And the elves must be awfully hot in their red and green velvet britches. There must be a summer wardrobe for Santa and his elves, don't you think? Red shorts for all, minus the velvet and the fur?

The eBay pages tell me that there are 45 days till Christmas. eBay is reminding everyone of that count-down not to get everyone into the holiday spirit, but to get everyone bidding and shopping and buying. Now that the decorations are up here, I've been wrapping gifts every day. Looking at the little piles of Christmas gifts which have become part of the decorations in my dressing room, this is the time of the year when I say We have way too many cousins in this family!

But Christmas is for the kids... and as my cousin F says-- everyone needs to be a kid at Christmas, no matter their age. Jingle bells to that.