Anyone wanna see a short Video of our Christmas lights in London this year? Not exactly cutting edge , this video, there are other on youtube much, ..much longer, but this one goes up the side streets mostly rather than the main Oxford street lights and no talking on it, which is nice .. if you get bored , jump to around 7 minutes where they go into Fortnum and Mason department store, and you will see all the male sales assistants walking around in Black tie and tails.. then further at around 10 minutes you;ll see Burlington Arcade, which is really pretty.....
I ignore all the holiday decorations displayed in the stores until that first winter snap of cold weather hits which usually happens before Thanksgiving then the cogwheels in my brain start to churnin'. Our Christmas tree goes up and decorating follows in spurts as the ideas keep a'coming. Remembering childhood Christmas' they were mostly spent at my grandparents. Only that white tree with the rotating color wheel in the foyer for decorations with presents beneath it. The best part was all the candy and cookies with hot cocoa Grandma prepared for us without fail on every visit. Someone would start a Christmas carol and then everyone seemed to join in. I'm sure I wasn't the only one that noticed the out-of-tuners', lol. Reflecting back on the early days of adulthood at age 19 my Christmas' weren't to memorable. My mom had an opportunity to transfer to a position in Texas that dampened my spirit some. She was a lot like my grandparents seeming to draw a lot of the family together during the holidays. Becoming a parent changed my spirit at Christmastime always keeping upfront the reason for the season to my boys. Taking them to parades, tikes' shopping any event I could get us to and watching their eyes light up, man it was a beautiful time. I myself was taking in all the decorations surrounding us, go figure, lol. After divorce recuperation, the empty nester syndrome, lol, I met and married Johnny Ray Jones. We have had some of the best Christmas' together even when times were rough that silver lining came through. He didn't really like the idea of putting up a Christmas tree before Thanksgiving at first but he doesn't say anything about it anymore. "A happy wife is a happy life."
Good post, @Von Jones. Thanks for sharing it. For me, Christmas was, by far, the most magical of the holidays. We opened most of our gifts on Christmas Eve, which were the ones from the family. The gifts couldn't be open until after supper, and dad would intentionally take forever with his coffee and dessert, it seemed. On Christmas morning, the gifts from Santa appeared. These were usually one gift per person, and they were the big ones. If we were ever going to get a new bicycle or something really spectacular, that would be there on Christmas morning, and it would be from Santa. Otherwise, Christmas Day was about church and family. There was a 4 am Christmas Morning service at church. Afterward, we'd go back to bed, and I'd wake up again as if the church service had been a dream, as I could remember very little of it. On Christmas Day, we usually had other family members for dinner, such as the grandparents, or the pastor and his family, who made the rounds. Sometimes, we'd have an uncle or an aunt whose spouse had died and were alone, or my Uncle Art, who was single. After dinner, we could play with our gifts. Unless we had someone over for dinner who had kids, none of my friends would be around on Christmas, nor did we go to anyone else's house.
We would go to the tree lot the Saturday before Christmas, unless Christmas Day was early in the week and then we'd go the week before. Up would go the tree and on would go the ornaments. Christmas Eve, we'd go to church, meet our grandparents there and they'd come home with us to spend the night. . Home to a good meal, the reading of "The Night Before Christmas" by my dad and listening to music on the radio. It was always exciting to hear the announcements that "NORAD had spotted an unidentified flying object leaving the North Pole and entering American airspace". What else could it be but Santa? Periodically there would be an update: spotted over Fargo, now spotted over Denver, now seen over Miami." We could open one present of our choice that night. OH, the agony! Which one? The next morning would come shouted up the stairs to our bedrooms: "SANTA'S BEEN HERE! YOU GIRLS BETTER GET DOWN HERE AND SEE WHAT HE'S BROUGHT!" We'd gather at the foot of the stairs, a scrum of seething anticipation. We couldn't head for the living room until the coffee had perked and the adults had their cups in hand. It felt like it took them an hour to get that darned coffee perked. Then a frenzy of present opening ensued, with my mother instructing "DON'T TEAR THE PAPER! OPEN THE PRESENTS CAREFULLY!!" (she reused the paper for years.....) My grandparents would be beaming, we would all be happy, and my parents were probably wondering when the bills would come in. One year (and I didn't hear about it for years), my parents had gone to do their shopping a couple of weeks before Christmas. My mom had saved money extra hard that year and it was going to be an Extra!Great!Christmas! When they came out to the parking lot after their last stop, someone had jimmied the back door of the station wagon and had made off with all the toys. They used what little money they had left to get whatever they could afford. Mom said it was a skimpy Christmas under the tree that year, but I can't remember feeling that way. I'm pretty sure they did some "robbing Peter to pay Paul" that year to not disappoint us.
My parents waited until a few days before Christmas. When I got older, I realized it was because we used baby pine trees and they start shedding early on. All of us now put up our artificial ones the week of Thanksgiving.