Whoops, There Goes Another One

There goes another week, that is. I'm convinced time is actually relative rather than ordered. When did it get to be December? Only two seconds ago, and yet the first week is almost in the bag.

True to my-life-is-nuts form, I promised a regular feature on the first Mondays of the month and blew it right away. Why?

Christmas.

I'll be the first to admit I struggle with Christmas. First, because I get grumpy when I see the first Christmas decor come out BEFORE Halloween at the local Stuff Mart. There oughta be a law. Second, because I prefer Thanksgiving, though that's probably because I prefer pie to cookies, and Thanksgiving just plain OWNS the pie category for holidays. Thirdly, I'm turned off by celebrations of overt consumption. Though I'm a fallen Lutheran (I turned in my casserole dish years ago), I still would rather have a Christmas that concentrates more on the meaningful aspects than the mandatory decking of halls and enforced donning of gay apparel.

Fa-la-la-la-la bawk bawk bawk BAWK!

Last weekend I got the tree put together and managed not to swear or break anything. We have a fake tree, which is a new development since I bought the house. We used to live in Michigan, which has acres of lovely and lush Christmas tree farms, and we had some real beauties when I lived there. In the particular corner of the Midwest that I now live, no one would dare give up a square inch of row crop land for trees, and real trees are shipped from Minnesota, two weeks old, already dry as tinder. It's sad and expensive and fake seemed the lesser evil. I will say it's nice not to have to remember to water, and nice not to have to untangle strands of lights every year.

I've thrown up my vintage bottle brush trees on the mantel, shown above. The little boys think the name "bottle brush" is just hilarious. I gathered them one by one over the last ten years, but I think they've now become too expensive for my taste. It's a collection that doesn't need to get any bigger though. I mix truly old Christmas stuff freely with stuff I call "oldish" (like the ornaments that are mixed in with the trees), meaning things made to look vintage but really aren't. At Christmas time people seem to hunger for a past maybe even they can't claim, so it's easy to find Christmas decorations that fit in with the genuinely vintage.

Last year I made the kids homemade Christmas ornaments from craft leftovers I had laying around the house:

I'll probably do the same this year, but I may have taxed the limit of my skills. I'm out of ideas. And time. Still, I like the idea better than buying LPC (the family acronym for Little Plastic Crap).

This weekend is for cookies, gift wrapping, and shipping the annual box off to my sister in Atlanta. Probably a little music to get me in the mood too. At Christmas I listen to music of extremes, like the  Missa Puer Natus est Nobis from the 16th century, and something like Otis Redding.

Are you ready for the holidays? Are you a relaxed or rushed holiday partier? A last minute shopper or an all year planner? However you do it and whatever you celebrate, have a great December!