It’s Wednesday evening, well, still late-afternoon, but FEELS like evening, or has for the last half-hour plus. It’s 5:15pm right now.
We are into Winter now, but it was kinda warm today, up to the mid-50’s. The house moderated out the last few days, with a space heater in our upstairs (master) bathroom, that seemed to help the whole of the three bedrooms and hallway up there, for some reason, but that was coupled with having the fireplace going down in the “dining room” from at least 6am until 8pm, if not earlier and later. Today I felt fine dressed normal for Winter, denim dress, slip, silk shirt, cotton thick tights, and sneakers, so I didn’t light a fire … but by 3pm I was a little more chilled that desirable, so I set to making a fire, and it was nice. It roared, I sat down to watch it, catch some heat, and make sure it caught well once the initial rush to consume paper and bark and small wood died down.
I called “here kitty, kitty, kitty” a couple of times to invite the cats to enjoy the fire with me, and in short time I had a cat and a kitten on my lap, and Victoria sat down by me the other kitten and another cat climbed on her lap. I ended up with THAT kitten climbing over to my lap a few mintues later, and we all snoozed cat nappedly in the glow of the hot flames. It was nice.
But didn’t last, mind refreshed from short nap sitting up, I had to get up and had to interest the cats in leaving. A nudge here and there and they got the picture. I hate dumping a cat unceremoniously off my lap 😉
The fire did the trick and warmed the dining room space fairly well, taking the edge off, that had been starting to get to me.
The temps out today were fine for no fire to be made, but since the sun didn’t make a good appearance all day, we lacked in solar heating on the South Side of the house, which is the room next to the dining room, the kitchen. So once moderate turned to bitey, fireplace is the nicest thing to be next to in the house, except for a warm bed, but even flannel sheets are warm when one first gets into them in a cold room! 😯
So it’s just a few days until Christmas.
We MIGHT be getting a LIVE tree. Might. Not sure yet. At any rate, we have no Christmas tree at this point. Frank’s been busy doing work stuff out of the house this week so far, and we’ve not been able to make any joint decisions about that and other Christmas Day stuff yet.
Maybe we’ll be able to get dressed up and go see what the Methodist Church around the corner is doing on Friday Night. Maybe we won’t. We don’t know if they are hosting anything. (Our church practices Regulative Principle of Worship and doesn’t do Christmas in the church, as Christ is worshipped each Sunday as His Birth, Life, Death, Resurrection, and Ascension are part of that in confession and creed and word.)
We haven’t done much Christmas, except get some gifts for the children already. But no tree, and no special events. I didn’t send cards, didn’t last year either. It’s just a job I gave up on. I used to send them, but you know, two years in a row not sending [maybe more!] we got the same amount of cards as always. Just the relatives who send cards, and a couple of friends.
I will send some kind of Season’s Greetings in return to them, if I can make myself do that! I’m so disorganized with all my writing stuff. I did used to be better with it, but the rubbermaid boxes I kept some of it in have broken and that messed the organization all up, as well as some stuff buried with other boxes … ho hum.
I need to buy something new to send anyhow. I used to make my own cards, on the computer, or that plus rubberstamping and embossing. My embossing things and stamp colors were *hrum* destroyed in series of unfortunate (for me) mishaps with children. Urg. But that’s that.
I still have my heat gun, and … well, stamps that aren’t applicable to what I’d do, always need new ones, you know? Maybe I can garner enough sympathy to get some new stamps, powder, stamp pads … and of course, blank cards.
OK, already made cards is cheaper and quicker.
I have holiday paper for letters, but it’s so gaudy I don’t know why I ever bought it. I mean, it’s definitely the kind of thing to print out a nice family letter at Christmas time, if one has good news to share. We don’t have anything particularly wonderful to say, and really me, I’d just drone on about the misery of losing a baby, dog, favorite cat, MIL and blah, blah, blah. Everyone knows the only reason to write a Christmas letter for mass mailing is to brag up the family members. That’s just not me in any case. 🙂
Christmas is dull this year, and was last year. We tried harder other years. It’s just hard to make traditions alone, IMO. Christmas runs on my power in our household, I mean the “decorations” the “way it feels” the “way it sounds”. My disorganization has only grown as the children have grown, of course! Visual-Spatial people struggle with organization and I can attest to the truth of THAT!
We need to find outlets for cultural Christmas is we want to get revved up. We just haven’t done that. We don’t view Christmas in the way that many Christians do. So it’s an odd mixture of Celebration of Christ coming to earth so many years ago, but not only that also it’s a cultural celebration for the cold dark part of the year. It’s mostly that. We have our identity in Christ daily. We don’t put him back in the manger once a year, but have no problem in reading Luke 2, etc. It’s hard to explain, so I’ll leave it at that.
I’ll be putting Handel’s Messiah back in the CD player tomorrow. (I overplayed it for months on end the other year, and took it out finally, literally listened to it for hours and hours and hours for the better part of a year, most days. :veryshocked: ) The full story of the Messiah, that’s worth celebrating 🙂 All Year Long, every year.
So, I am thinking for a tree, if we get one, I’ll make some gingerbread shapes to hang and we have a partial red/brown/green paper chain I had the children make yesterday and today. That and who knows what else.
A LIVE tree can only be in the house 3 days, the store people say. A cut tree is cheaper this late date. A LIVE tree would be planted outside to live and grow. A cut tree would become a leaning things for wildlife to shelter in and let it age until it crumbles to nothingness over the years. A LIVE tree is more money, a cut tree is less money, so a cut tree MIGHT be something to go for if I can go to, say Cost Plus and get some nice old-world ornaments … I love that store. Cost Plus is it’s name, but it has “World” and maybe something else in it too. It’s a neat import store, if you don’t have one that you can visit. It differnt IMO from Pier One, for instance. Cost Plus is an affordable store, for one thing, just different too.
Well the final about the tree is that a LIVE tree would probably live and grow to be a big tree in our yard somewhere. Frank looked at some today, but made no decision. A dwarf spruce something-or-other is available, 4-ft high, will grow taller, but also end up being 10-ft wide. Not too big, just nice, I think about 8-10 ft tall, maybe just 8ft. Anyhow, he liked it, said it looked GREEN. I couldn’t determine how green, if it is anything like I require [a blue-green, not anything lesser, yellowy, emeraldy, not me!]
We always, when we have had trees, which is every year since our marriage, Christmas of 1992 through 2002 we had a Noble Fir once, maybe a spruce once, but I don’t usually like those in stores. Every other tree was a Frasier Fir, and that’s my prefered look, High Victorian-ish, yet style with minimalist classic decor. I’ll see about gathering past tree pictures and post about what my ideal way to decorate would be, given my druthers of money and time and energy to gather the right ingredients together.
My tastes have changed over the years, but have been the same basically since marriage, but I haven’t had the means to explore and extract that dream in my visionary mind. I’m not very resourceful with no resources to exploit 🙂
So for me, I settled on having a year ornament every year, since 1994 we’ve done that, minus last year. Black-hole Christmas that one was, in a way. Descriptive of how it was in some angles, not all. Just the dullest of all of them at that point.
September of that year we lost our cat Cinnamon suddenly, she up and died. That settled a fog over me, but it wasn’t depression. It’s lasted as well, since losing so many other things since then. But again, it’s not depression. I’m not depressed about losing the baby in March. I’m totally at ease with it, My emotions have utter loss attached to them forever though, and the dicotomy of that emotional-me/normal-nothing-wrong-me is distinctly super weird. I’m fine then crying, then fine, when faced with something that reminds me of the whole affair. My problem too is my vivid imagination has created indepth films and horror shows that no words could describe. So it’s a totally different me since the end of March, I’ve molded, I’ve aged, I’ve changed for the better, lost a little gloss but gained another type of gloss and glimmer over there. I’ve mellowed, I’ve grown an old soul where I thought I had one but must not have. I’ve learned much more and more than that, and have so much more to learn. Sigh. I’m just so different, and Christmas has suffered in the midst of it all.
Well I tried with making cookies, got one batch baked on Monday, and two fridge chill batches, but haven’t gotten them out yet. Too much cleaning to do that I can’t quite conquer. So yesterday the paper chain idea I got I implemented mid-afternoon, and that made a huge mess and continued into this morning. I let the children do it after a couple of hours of it yesterday, meaning, I let them do it all themselves and I did other stuff. They did fine, having never made one before. So today, they finished up the strips I’d made, and we had no more brown paper to continue the pattern, so that was all of the chain. They got more paper out without asking and started cutting other stuff out, and that led to me making “Crowns” for them all. Something I’d not done before. So this all ended up being a kind of creative time that I’d snuffed out for so long.
I also cut out some hearts joined, cut out of one piece to get several in a row, like any other shape you can do that with, people, stars, whatever. I tried pasting it on a ribbon, but they dried and ending up falling off. Dark Pink, I was going to hang it in Victoria’s room.
In any case, it awoke a paper decorating monster in me, and ideas are flowing to get wacky stuff made for our cheap decor, at least until we can get other “REAL” stuff going. In any case, it’s perfect for the children’s rooms to make paper decorations out of whatever paper we have. So that’s not Christmas stuff, but flowed out of a Christmas thang.