The holidays were a mixed bag of joy with a bit of the blues thrown in. Hubby was out working in Alberta and didn’t get home until December 30th so I put all of the celebrations on hold. His brother and wife arrived from Ontario on Christmas Day to keep me company. Being alone for the holidays was going to be a downer and I so appreciated their presence, their love, and all the laughs.
Our birthdays were the week before Christmas, mine on the 18th and hubby’s on the 19th. It seems for all our special occasions, birthdays’ anniversaries etc, he’s never home and then as time passes, we tend to forget them, but this year, once he was home, we celebrated with a carrot cake and toasted the new numbers with a great Pinot Noir. Then New Years eve followed on the 31st and we brought in the new year together. We dined on turkey on January 2nd. It was a whirlwind couple of days but joyous and exciting.
This year Christmas blind sided me. It snuck up and caught me unprepared so I was beating the pavement a few days before Christmas doing last minute things. I’d put out the effort for our annual rug hooking Christmas pot luck on the 11th but when that was over, I quickly lost momentum. Perhaps feeling down about being alone sabotaged any desire to get things done. I didn’t even do any Christmas baking which in hindsight was probably a blessing. The mood I was in I might have eaten it all, instead I occupied my time reshaping the sofa cushions to fit my widening arse with little concern for much else. I dulled my mind with a slew of British renovating shows and food competitions, meaningless distractions from my disappointment. I kept saying it could be worse, no one died and I took comfort in that, but I think I deserved the right to feel a bit sorry for myself, there are so few things to celebrate and Christmas is the biggest and last hurrah before the end of an old year.
When my sister-in-law phoned to say they planned to arrive on Christmas day, my spirits lifted like a helium filled balloon. I’d been playing Christmas tunes as if it was a cure for all that ailed me. The sparkling tree lights burned day and night in an attempt to levitate my spirits but did little to dent my ebbing enthusiasm. Company was the pill I needed to get out of my funk.
I put the tree in by myself for the pot luck party and it was a challenge. It’s a man’s job, heck anything that you can break a fingernail over is a man’s job, and this one was awkward and pressed my buttons. I had to cut a foot off the stump to fit the tree in the house and that’s when I discovered the darn trunk was like the leaning tower of Pisa. The struggle to hold it straight in the stand straight while I tightened the bolts exhausted my vocabulary of swear words. The tree was as crooked as a ram’s horn and the branches on one side were a foot shorter than on the other with gaps between them too large to fill in with ornaments. I’m not sure why I picked this one, it was cold that day and I didn’t want to be a bother to the people who offered to drive me to a lot in their truck so I took the first one they stood up for me. It was an ugly ducking tree that I did my best to decorate into a beautiful swan but it ended up somewhere in-between.
The dogs weren’t impressed as I struggled and mumbled a blue streak. They were watching me with big eyes, that asked ‘who are you crazy lady and where’s mom?’ By the time I was finished and satisfied it wouldn’t fall over, I put water in the trough. I was covered in sticky sap and needed a nap on the sofa. Then there was the ladder to the attic to contend with and hauling down the boxes of ornaments and lights. Once again, a man’s job, dangerous on my own schlepping all those containers and bags from the tiny hole in the ceiling while balanced on a small wooden ladder. It was exhausting so there was napping in-between trips up and down. By the time I got around to decorating the tree it was 1:00 AM. And that’s when I realized I hadn’t remembered to buy new lights. Last year some of the sets gave up the ghost and I forgot to buy more. I like lights, lots of lights, like hundreds of twinkling stars in my living room, but all I had were three sets of 50 each, hardly enough illumination to be seen from the moon.
Last year I started something new. I ran a string of coloured lights down the trunk of the tree, wrapping them around the core. Then I used the white lights to do the outer branches. With only three small sets there wasn’t enough to cover the tree so the upper part didn’t have much sparkly. If you look at a tree through squinted eyes with the room lights off, its clearly noticeable how the placement is. Fortunately, the top of the tree is where the coloured lights show through the most so it hid the white light shortage but I clearly had more tree than lights this year. It’s wasn’t the best tree we’ve ever had but far from a Charlie Brown, and for some reason I hated to take it down. It lasted till the end of January sparkling up the place and filling me with blingy joy and it would shoot out its essence filling the room with a scent of spruce everyday as if to say thank you for keeping me around. I’ve never had a tree up past New Years day but there aren’t any rules to follow or break, it gave me joy, enough said.
I kept our grain fed, free range turkey on ice until hubby arrived home. We decided to wait until after new years for the feast. We partied hard ringing in the new year, downing Dark & Stormys like it was a cure for old age and played games and cards with friends and family until the wee hours. We lit expired boat flares at the midnight hour and the sky radiated a pink glow. In lieu of lobsters that were in short supply, we opted for homemade pizzas which might be a new tradition, or at least an alternating one. They were deliscious and I discovered that the local pizza place sells raw dough and I bought two to make 16” pizzas for $3:00 each which eliminates messing around with dough at home.
We only ever do turkey at Christmas and there is no better homey smell wafting throughout the house. I’m not a big fan of the meat, I find it dry, but it’s a tradition of my childhood that tugs on memories of mom and the incredible feast she always placed before us. It was tough not smelling it on Christmas, its part of the total magic of the day, but considering we basically treated it like any ordinary Wednesday, I got over it. We made butter chicken and a salad for our Christmas meal with lots of wine to wash it down that helped obscure my view of the empty chair at the other end of the table.
When hubby arrived home and walked through the door, we locked eyes and smiled, hugged ever so tightly and once again, all was right in my world.
Our birthdays were the week before Christmas, mine on the 18th and hubby’s on the 19th. It seems for all our special occasions, birthdays’ anniversaries etc, he’s never home and then as time passes, we tend to forget them, but this year, once he was home, we celebrated with a carrot cake and toasted the new numbers with a great Pinot Noir. Then New Years eve followed on the 31st and we brought in the new year together. We dined on turkey on January 2nd. It was a whirlwind couple of days but joyous and exciting.
This year Christmas blind sided me. It snuck up and caught me unprepared so I was beating the pavement a few days before Christmas doing last minute things. I’d put out the effort for our annual rug hooking Christmas pot luck on the 11th but when that was over, I quickly lost momentum. Perhaps feeling down about being alone sabotaged any desire to get things done. I didn’t even do any Christmas baking which in hindsight was probably a blessing. The mood I was in I might have eaten it all, instead I occupied my time reshaping the sofa cushions to fit my widening arse with little concern for much else. I dulled my mind with a slew of British renovating shows and food competitions, meaningless distractions from my disappointment. I kept saying it could be worse, no one died and I took comfort in that, but I think I deserved the right to feel a bit sorry for myself, there are so few things to celebrate and Christmas is the biggest and last hurrah before the end of an old year.
When my sister-in-law phoned to say they planned to arrive on Christmas day, my spirits lifted like a helium filled balloon. I’d been playing Christmas tunes as if it was a cure for all that ailed me. The sparkling tree lights burned day and night in an attempt to levitate my spirits but did little to dent my ebbing enthusiasm. Company was the pill I needed to get out of my funk.
I put the tree in by myself for the pot luck party and it was a challenge. It’s a man’s job, heck anything that you can break a fingernail over is a man’s job, and this one was awkward and pressed my buttons. I had to cut a foot off the stump to fit the tree in the house and that’s when I discovered the darn trunk was like the leaning tower of Pisa. The struggle to hold it straight in the stand straight while I tightened the bolts exhausted my vocabulary of swear words. The tree was as crooked as a ram’s horn and the branches on one side were a foot shorter than on the other with gaps between them too large to fill in with ornaments. I’m not sure why I picked this one, it was cold that day and I didn’t want to be a bother to the people who offered to drive me to a lot in their truck so I took the first one they stood up for me. It was an ugly ducking tree that I did my best to decorate into a beautiful swan but it ended up somewhere in-between.
The dogs weren’t impressed as I struggled and mumbled a blue streak. They were watching me with big eyes, that asked ‘who are you crazy lady and where’s mom?’ By the time I was finished and satisfied it wouldn’t fall over, I put water in the trough. I was covered in sticky sap and needed a nap on the sofa. Then there was the ladder to the attic to contend with and hauling down the boxes of ornaments and lights. Once again, a man’s job, dangerous on my own schlepping all those containers and bags from the tiny hole in the ceiling while balanced on a small wooden ladder. It was exhausting so there was napping in-between trips up and down. By the time I got around to decorating the tree it was 1:00 AM. And that’s when I realized I hadn’t remembered to buy new lights. Last year some of the sets gave up the ghost and I forgot to buy more. I like lights, lots of lights, like hundreds of twinkling stars in my living room, but all I had were three sets of 50 each, hardly enough illumination to be seen from the moon.
Last year I started something new. I ran a string of coloured lights down the trunk of the tree, wrapping them around the core. Then I used the white lights to do the outer branches. With only three small sets there wasn’t enough to cover the tree so the upper part didn’t have much sparkly. If you look at a tree through squinted eyes with the room lights off, its clearly noticeable how the placement is. Fortunately, the top of the tree is where the coloured lights show through the most so it hid the white light shortage but I clearly had more tree than lights this year. It’s wasn’t the best tree we’ve ever had but far from a Charlie Brown, and for some reason I hated to take it down. It lasted till the end of January sparkling up the place and filling me with blingy joy and it would shoot out its essence filling the room with a scent of spruce everyday as if to say thank you for keeping me around. I’ve never had a tree up past New Years day but there aren’t any rules to follow or break, it gave me joy, enough said.
I kept our grain fed, free range turkey on ice until hubby arrived home. We decided to wait until after new years for the feast. We partied hard ringing in the new year, downing Dark & Stormys like it was a cure for old age and played games and cards with friends and family until the wee hours. We lit expired boat flares at the midnight hour and the sky radiated a pink glow. In lieu of lobsters that were in short supply, we opted for homemade pizzas which might be a new tradition, or at least an alternating one. They were deliscious and I discovered that the local pizza place sells raw dough and I bought two to make 16” pizzas for $3:00 each which eliminates messing around with dough at home.
We only ever do turkey at Christmas and there is no better homey smell wafting throughout the house. I’m not a big fan of the meat, I find it dry, but it’s a tradition of my childhood that tugs on memories of mom and the incredible feast she always placed before us. It was tough not smelling it on Christmas, its part of the total magic of the day, but considering we basically treated it like any ordinary Wednesday, I got over it. We made butter chicken and a salad for our Christmas meal with lots of wine to wash it down that helped obscure my view of the empty chair at the other end of the table.
When hubby arrived home and walked through the door, we locked eyes and smiled, hugged ever so tightly and once again, all was right in my world.
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