Nine days from today, our Christmas Trek will begin once more. We are looking forward to it with new-found joy!
Yep, next week my wife has Thanksgiving, Black Friday and the weekend off. Perhaps some Black Friday shopping, but also heading down to the garage to get the inside and outside Christmas décor. Will be sitting up our Christmas Village on dining room table. Last weekend bought The Ranch building for it and have some miniature farm animals ordered online for around it. Haven't set up our Village in three or four years. Won't do a lot of outdoor lighting, but some. It will be the last year for our 8' artificial tree and some of the décor for it, along with some outside lighting. When we move, won't have the same type of apartment (1-story "bungalow"), like we do now, so won't have the room outside for all of the lights we now have. My wife REALLY looks forward to decorating for Christmas and I do to (just not as much as she does).
Don't forget folks when you have it all set up, to take a picture or 10 to show us... I love seeing everyone's pics..
The weekend after Thanksgiving has been my wife's "Christmas Decorating Time" since before we got married. No Black Friday shopping for her. We had one son who got her spirit , as well as our two daughters, and they used to help. My job was always the photographer to document the process. We have an artificial tree now, but when the children were home, we had real trees, some of which were "Charlie Brown Specials". Our twin sons headed into the woods on their dogsleds to find the tree they wanted. The real trees were the last thing up and usually were only up for a week or two to avoid fire danger, but the rest of the house was decorated in one form or another, inside and out.
When I was a kid we used to cut a tree in the back lot of my grandmother's farm. Our Christmas tree stand was a galvanized bucket with rocks wedged around the base of the tree and a fine wire around the middle of the tree so we could anchor it to the wall. I remember making paper chains to hang on the tree, long wood shaving curls, varnished whole walnuts and pinecones mixed in with a few German glass ornaments, a string of bubble lights topped off with a few silver icicles. The tree skirt was an old bedsheet and our stockings were our socks. I remember negotiating with my oldest brother one Christmas to see if I could use one of his old hunting socks because it was so much bigger than mine. Then along came the folks from Madison Avenue ...
The Baker Street Irregulars... (reference) A group of London children carrying holly and mistletoe. 1915 .. (Just a picture I thought was cute.)
Yes, I definitely remember the Bubble Lights. Actually, back on that old hog farm, we buy a tree in town, put into a tree stand in living room and parents would decorate it while I was doing something else. Wasn't into decorating the tree back then, but, then again, my wife does most of the decorating of our tree. Anyway, if the tree was still alive after Christmas (on the farm), my dad would plant it by the driveway where some other past Christmas trees we had were. And, no decorating outside on the farm.