How many more days til Christmas?

I have been busy taking down Halloween decorations and putting up Christmas things. Every single Santa and angel and elf and reindeer has been taken out if its packing box and is now displayed around the house. Ditto for all of the table-top trees. My dad’s Nativity set is in the dining room this year... every time I set that up, I have to wonder how the sheep survived my “playing farm” with them when I was a kid. And now we live across the road from a real farm, with horses and goats and cows. Not one sheep, though. Why in the world this city-kid was playing with farm animals in the 1950s is just beyond me. I have to wonder why my Aunt Dolly didn’t hand me a pair of her high heels and tell me to practice walking around the house in them instead of playing with those sheep.

Now that the house is exploding with Christmas, I have to get gifts wrapped and ready for mailing. I usually do that in August and September when it’s too hot to do much of anything outside here. I don’t know what I was so busy with in August, but I do know that the world tilted in September and I was not in the mood for Christmas gift-wrapping that month. But as my husband’s mother always used to say... No matter what happens in this world, life goes on in a sensible way. And now, life is just going on.

The kittens Julius and Peaches are growing into beautiful, calm, and well-behaved cats. They have quit tormenting our older cat Sweet Pea, and our dog Savannah is playing with the kittens instead of just chasing them. Everyone is getting along happily and it just makes me smile to see our 75-pound dog Savannah gently sniffing the nose of an eight-pound kitten.

The Book Club students are busy writing daily diaries, a la The Wimpy Kid series. I gave them notebooks and pens and they are either writing about their day-to-day adventures, or making up a diary about a fictional character.  One of the girls is writing her diary as if she were a teenaged boy named Sam. As she told me... If J.K. Rowling could write about a boy named Harry, then I can try writing about a boy named Sam.  Which led us into a discussion about Jo Rowling, because two of the boys didn’t realize that J.K. Rowling was a woman. (For real? No way!  —Yes, way!)

Another student is writing about her family... as she was reading a chapter to all of us, she said that her mother had died. Not even taking a breath after that sentence, as all of us listened with dropped jaws, she continued to read her entry. When she finished reading, you could have heard the proverbial pin dropping in that room. I asked the student if her diary was truth or fiction, and she said it was true... she said she was writing her autobiography (which we discussed last week).  These kids just break my heart.

As I arranged the Christmas decorations this past week, I put some aside into my “Adopt a Santa!” give-away box.  Into that box went some small Santa figurines, a few angels, tree ornaments, snowmen, small nutcrackers. Little bits of Christmas that need to find new homes. I intend to bring that box to the Book Club students at the beginning of December so they can adopt a bit of Christmas for themselves.  Heaven knows these kids need all the extra joy they can get.