O Tannenbaum

It's almost Christmas, and I might be ahead of the curve this year. I'm going down to Mom's early and you know what? It's December 23rd and I think I'm going to fill the stockings tonight. 

Such a radical thought! So humane! I'm not sure why, but I get really hung up on the task after a night of hanging with my peeps, overeating, doing the dishes and then avoiding going to church. By 11:30 when the grand mammoo and big sis go to church I really don't feel like stuffing the stockings. However I'm going to love doing it tonight.

After trimming the tree last week, I really find myself craving a tree. But cats are bad and our house is so small that I don't know where we would put one...

An article in the paper today reminded me of my tree trimming traditions before I met mrguy. My bro would always bring us trees. Here I was living in a $200 a month studio apartment and I had a twelve foot Christmas tree. One year he left it for me in the foyer of my apartment building. I don't think I had a tree stand, but I didn't want the tree to dry out before I got one, so I stood it up in my walk-in closet in a champagne bucket that had ended up in my apartment the night I had to take one of the busboys to the ER (guess I iced his hand in it).

I remember not having any ornaments the first year I had a tree, so I took all the jewelry out of my jewelry box and draped the tree with it. The earrings worked especially well. And I had a thing for realistic looking plastic vegetables and children's play food, so that went on it as well. The first necklace tree was decorated by miss wartz and I, I recall, while drinking some perfectly awful cola flavored wine coolers from the Canned Food Warehouse. So nasty!

One year in that time frame, my old boss bought her next-door-neighbor's house. This was in an old part of town near the shipyards, where the Great Migration ended during the war. People were encouraged to rent out rooms to men and women working in the war effort. The woman who had owned the house had built a two room structure in her back yard and rented out the rooms during the war. Afterward she just used the structure as storage for many things including a lifetime of Christmas decorations. My boss invited me over to look at them, and I went home with a back seat full of 1950s lights, glass ornaments and glass bead garlands. That year I had an amazing tree. The decorations I didn't want I put in the dumpster. Two hours later, my discards were making my venerable neighbor, Lydia, very happy.

I still have many of the ornaments from the back yard shack. It's a shame not to have them out.

I'm listening to one of my traditional tree-trimming records, though. 

This year that's gonna be good enough :)