Almost Thanksgiving...

Not much happening lately....... except for two nights of rain, nothing has been going on up here. The rain was pouring last night and the night before-- so much so that the ponds now have water in them. Imagine that-- a pond with real wet water.

Over the weekend, we had dinner at J & G's... along with J&J and W&L, this was their first 'company dinner' since their big move from PA to TX. J&G's formerly 'June-only' house is now their permanent home back there in the woods...... and it truly has become home. And of course, now that Pumpkin Kitty has taken up residence on their back porch, what further proof does one need that their little house in the woods is now their one and only home? Plus, you can toss in a visiting raccoon who steals bird-feeders and eats cat food, and sprinkle in a knock-out vintage red kitchen cabinet, and Home is what J has made.

We're still walking every morning.... me and J and J, and sometimes G..... most mornings have been warm, but on the few cold-snap mornings, when JS walks down the road in just jeans and a tee-shirt, it just makes me shiver all the more. No jacket? No sweater underneath? No hood? No gloves? No scarf? J says this Autumn weather has been just beautiful... and indeed it has, except for the occasional cold snap that blows in and gives us 50-degree mornings. I told JS that her body is still set to Yankee-time..... and these November mornings don't feel cold to her yet because her interior thermostat is expecting temperatures to already be hovering around the freezing point. Next year.... just wait till next year.... she'll be bundled up in four or five layers like the rest of us as soon as the temperature goes down past 58 degrees.

I've sent out invitations for our Christmas party.... friends/neighbors here, and friends/neighbors in Clear Lake........ This will be our first Christmas party in this big old house of ours, and certainly not the last, one would hope. Some of our friends from the old neighborhood are planning to make the two-hour drive from there to here for the party. I wish we had a wide choice of live entertainment selections that we had in the Houston area. We always booked a different kind of band for our Christmas parties back there, but I don't think we'll be doing that here. What would our choices be? Country. Or how about country-western? Quite possibly Cajun-country. I think, for this first holiday party here, we will all just have to be our own entertainment.

We've been getting ready for Thanksgiving dinner..... we're making part of the dinner, J&J are making part of the turkey (including the turkey, which I truly hate to cook)..... and then we'll be enjoying our Thanksgiving dinner together. Gobble, gobble.

The ghosts of Christmases past have kept me tossing and turning on more than a few nights lately....... I always get a little sappy around the holidays, and this year is no different. So many memories... they started when I set up my parents' Nativity set...... I don't even have to close my eyes and I can hear my dad asking my mother "What color light do you want in the manger, A.... a blue one or a white one? Or how about yellow?" Every year when the tree went up and the Nativity was set out, my dad would ask my mother that very same question. My mother's answer was almost always "blue," but one year she picked a yellow light bulb....... daddy said it made the baby Jesus look like he had jaundice. (At four or five years old, I had no idea what that meant.)

And every Christmas, daddy and my mother would tell me not to play with the sheep around the manger. Of course, I did.... those cute little sheep would be on the living room coffee table, on the dining room table, in my bedroom on the second floor, or riding on the Lionel trains in my playroom on the third floor.... they were everywhere except in the manger. And now... I set up the sheep around the manger... some on the left side near the cow, a couple near the donkey on the right side, one is near the Infant's crib..... and they stay right where I put them. Oh well.

Just about 34 more days till Christmas. And then maybe the Christmas ghosts will rest.