Saturday, November 26, 2011

Slow Saturday, Sliding toward Christmas

We’ve had a reluctant autumn, haven’t we! Here where we live, there hasn’t even been a killing frost yet, so petunias and such are still blooming. But interspersed with our many mild autumn days, we have had some cold, rainy ones, too.

Like today: bllgh. It was gray all day, with rain and drizzle off and on. It seemed like I was wearing sunglasses indoors. Tonight, the streets are shiny and wet, and it’s just simply cold. Brrr, shudder-shudder.




And you know how it is this time of year, with the day length; it’s harder and harder to get up in the mornings. And it feels like “suppertime” when it gets dark around four!

Indeed, tonight’s supper was some nice hot chili and cornbread. Yum!

But somehow I’m totally not ready for “the holidays”—how can Thanksgiving be over, when petunias are still blooming? Weren’t we just cutting grass, like, yesterday? Usually we get our first snow around mid-November!

We’re sliding into December, though, and fortunately we have all the Christmas sales and decorations to make it perfectly clear! Here in the Munichburg neighborhood, one of our favorite “signs of the season” is when the local Optimist club sets up its Christmas tree lot at the Carpenters Building, on the corner of Broadway and Dunklin.




It always makes me happy to see them up there, the friendly men and the pretty trees and the strings of bare lightbulbs shining over there at the corner—even though we never buy a tree from them. (But if you buy real Christmas trees, you should consider patronizing them or another nonprofit service organization.)

As you might recall, we never buy a Christmas tree because we have Grandma’s tree to put up. A lot of people around here know about the tree, and they look up in our window to see it as they go by on Broadway. So it kind of feels like a duty to put it up each year.

But it’s a duty that’s a pleasure to perform—even if I don’t feel ready for “Christmas” yet. I think we’ll be putting it up this coming weekend, either the third or the fourth.

By the way, if you’ve read this far, and you or your group are interested in visiting the tree in person, I hope you’ll contact me. Grandma used to love sharing her tree with others, and I see no reason to end that tradition!




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