loracs: (xmas lights on star)
loracs ([personal profile] loracs) wrote2007-11-18 08:43 am
Entry tags:

Tis' the Season

I know Turkey day hasn't even come around, but I am (and have been) in xmas decorating mode for several weeks now. I'm currently at the stage of xmas crap everywhere waiting to be sorted and displayed. This year is a major triage year. It's been a long time since I CAN put everything out, but now I'm even making decisions to let some stuff go: one box for Good Will is already filled.

I still love to see it all, but I'm not sure how many more years I can do this level of decorating. As it is, I've had someone move most of the boxes from storage to the house. And Guy's attendant, Stacy, really helps me out with covering the bookcases.

I wonder if I'll scale back at some point or just stop all decorating cold turkey one year? If I do stop, it will break a tradition of 40 years. I was about 10 years old when I started drawing xmas decorations, coloring them, cutting them out and hanging them on the wall. Somewhere there is a Thanksgiving picture from this time with my decorations already up. I doubt Dad noticed, he worked so much and Mom was very tolerant of my budding obsession.

Even during years of transition, I had a few decorations out. My first year in California, I had just moved into my apartment in late November. This was MY first real xmas tree. My furniture hadn't arrived yet, but I had a tv tray, a folding chair and a xmas tree in my front room. We moved into this house right after Thanksgiving in 1999. Again, I didn't have any front room furniture (it was on order), but we had a real xmas tree!

I was too young to remember when my family had a real tree. My first memories were of a silver tinsel tree with the revolving colored spot light. After that, we had a fake tree because my Mom hated cleaning up the messy needles and my Dad had an extreme fear of fires. Each of our houses were one level, so we could easily jump out of the window - two level houses were unacceptably dangerous in his eyes. The two houses he "designed" had a connecting closet between the two bedrooms. He was always after Mom not to load the floor up with "junk" because that was our escape route. We could get to my parents and they could get to us, if either bedroom door became blocked. While we never actually practiced this, it was talked about enough that there is little doubt in my mind that if I'd ever smelled smoke in the middle of the night, my first instinct would have been to head for the closet.

Enough with the writing, for there is decorating to be done!

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