betsey: Jane, are you seeing what I’m seeing? City sidewalks, busy sidewalks, dressed in holiday style . . . Snow in Minneapolis and your beloved Colorado. Freezing here in our village. The pumpkins on our front porch are bravely holding their own, but pretty soon, like after Thanksgiving, they’ll be left to the squirrels and our wreaths and such will go up.
jane: I'm seeing it, but I'm not liking it. Heck, there's still a week to go before Thanksgiving! Give me more time to enjoy my gourds, my mums, my turkey trinkets, my autumn-colored candles – at least through November!
Give me more time to enjoy my gourds, my mums, my autumn-colored candles!
However, I have a different feeling about Christmas music entirely. I can listen to it all year round. I'm already firing up the Christmas CDs and can't wait till our local college radio station, WETN, starts playing Christmas music 24/7 from Thanksgiving through New Year's Day.
betsey: I know, isn’t that nice? I grew up with the Mormon Tabernacle Choir and Mitch Miller and an audio version of A Christmas Carol playing all season – in fact, I learned Christmas carols that way. Last year we got this weird-but-interesting CD by Sting with old Christmas songs and generally winter-themed music . . . very cool in the bleak midwinter.
jane: Yes, I'm starting to get inundated with catalogs (including Plow & Hearth) too. But I don't pore over them as I used to. I already have too much Christmas stuff; each year I find myself scaling down instead of piling on. In our smallish house, I'm less tolerant of clutter, even of the cheery Christmas variety. I have a few simple, cherished items I always put up: my lighted Bethlehem village, a special crèche, my Christmas wreaths, my Norwegian candleholders with their decorative rosemaling, the needlepoint stockings I made for our daughters (I even have stockings for our dogs). However, all this self-proclaimed selectivity probably will fly out the window the first Christmas we host with our granddaughter! I suspect having a grandchild in our home will change EVERYTHING about decorating for Christmas. I'll be pulling out stuff I haven't put up in years, stuff I'll look at this year and put back in the box.
betsey: You’re right – the “tacky factor” grows exponentially with young children. Plastic will return to your décor! Maybe even pink and purple!
jane: I don't know if I'll go that far . . .
betsey: The question: When do you decorate?
jane: Betsey, I'm adamant about waiting until after Thanksgiving to begin decorating for Christmas.
We have never set up a Christmas tree for Thanksgiving. I want to give Thanksgiving its due.
We have never set up a Christmas tree for Thanksgiving, as many of my friends do. I want to give Thanksgiving its due. So usually the weekend after Thanksgiving weekend, I'll politely ask Rich to haul all the green-colored bins and the fake tree out of our crawlspace, and then the fun (aka work) begins.
betsey: And when do you (Rich) put up your outdoor lights?
betsey: Guess what? I recently saw a house a few streets away that was blazing with lights. Before Veterans’ Day!
jane: That's just not right.
betsey: We generally do ours not Thanksgiving weekend but, like you, the weekend after. It’s amazing the unspoken peer pressure on this: you want to do your lights when the neighbors do, not a minute before and certainly not after. (My own informal rule of thumb: Lights MUST be extinguished by Martin Luther King’s birthday.)
jane: Yeah, there's nothing worse than seeing Christmas lights – and, I might add, dead wreaths – on houses after Valentine's Day. And I HAVE seen that in my own neighborhood.
betsey: And the last question: do you put up your tree when you do the rest of your decorating?
Every year I vow to go artificial . . . but something deep within me cries out, Don't give in!
We don’t . . . it’s just too much. Also, we buy real trees. Every year when we’re wrangling the thing into the stand, and Fritz has to guy it with rope because it’s listing, I vow to go artificial . . . but something deep within me cries out, Don’t give in!
jane: I used to feel that way, Betsey. I was a live tree purist who would look askance at those sell-outs who went artificial! Our family always cut down our Christmas trees (fake in the '50s and '60s was kind of scary; I remember my grandma had this blue metallic flocked tree – yikes!) So when Rich and I married and started our family, we followed suit. I tried to replicate my wonderful childhood memories of taking a sleigh ride out to the cutting fields, picking out the perfect tree, then sipping hot chocolate as my dad strapped our fragrant pine onto the roof of our sedan.
However, a few years into valiantly emulating this tradition, Rich and I experienced a very Clark Griswoldian, National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation scenario: Our daughters spent the whole time trudging through the Christmas tree field complaining of freezing and begging to go home. We had an epiphany: It was time to start buying our Christmas tree from a tree lot five minutes from home!
That lasted for several years. But then one day, a cute little artificial tree on sale at Target just spoke to me. Our kids were in college, our vacuum cleaner couldn't handle the constant choking on spent needles (I'd find them in the strangest places, too!), and I got tired of worrying about the tree becoming a fire hazard. I bought that cutie and brought her home, and I've never looked back.
betsey: Yep, I know more and more people who are opting for artificial. At least we don’t go far for our fir – a lot just minutes away. Time was when we did the back-to-nature, “cut down the tree” thing too . . . it was always muddy and the saw was always kind of dull and one year Fritz, after hours of manfully sawing away, started to feel somewhat unwell. And Amanda, six or seven at this time, would crouch at my feet in the front of our tiny hatchback to make room for O Tannenbaum.
But I wonder . . . does having an artificial tree stop the lights fights once and for all? If so . . . Target, here I come!
3 comments:
Good morning, ladies!
And thanks for starting my morning right with your blog. You don't know it but, out here in the wilds of North Idaho, YOUR blog often serves as my "girl time".
As I did this AM, I sit down with my "flavor of the day" (white chocolate macademia coffee) and "pretend" I'm sitting with a couple of girlfriends kibitzing about, well, whatever you guys are blogging about. (BTW--LOVE the additions of photos...especially LOVE it when I get to see photos of your "lives", like your homes, hearths, hubbies, etc.)
Anyway, BEFORE I opened your blog and poured myself that first cup of coffee I, cough, cough, turned on the lights of my TWO Christmas trees that are already up.
More than a decade ago, with the kids almost gone from the house, I began to see the writing on the wall...that IF our house was going to "sing" Merry Christmas it would be I, and likely I alone, who would make it happen.
No more having the help of three strapping sons--they'd likely be busy building lives of their own. And, forget the hub. After 35 years of marriage I've given up on exorcising the inner Scrooge out of the man.
So I bought two three foot (deep breath here) pre-decorated and pre-lit trees that came in lovely pounded coppery-bronze containers. I tuck one on top of a stand behind a couch in the living room so it looks like it's five feet tall and the other sits on a buffet in my dining room.
That was so easy, I added a pre-lit, pre-decorated wreath to match and hung it outside. Then I simply pulled out my beloved creche, stockings-for-the-mantel, Christmas plates and mugs, and called it good. VERY good.
Now, because we have family who sometimes only sees us at Thanksgiving, ALL of the above is in place (complete with Christmas music streaming from my music collection) well before Thanksgiving. Our Thanksgiving turkey is traditionally eaten on Christmas-tree-decorated china. The table is trimmed in red and green linens and boughs.
For some reason this tradition has brought comfort and calm to my household. If someone can't be with us in the latter part of December, not to worry, they'll "feel" like they were by virtue of our Thanksgiving-Christmas.
And, it goes without saying, since we winter in Arizona and leave two days after Christmas, I (and I alone) can pick everything up and tuck it night-night back in its box in less than 30 minutes. Now that IS a merry Christmas!
And same to you all!
Good morning, ladies!
And thanks for starting my morning right with your blog. You don't know it but, out here in the wilds of North Idaho, YOUR blog often serves as my "girl time".
As I did this AM, I sit down with my "flavor of the day" (white chocolate macademia coffee) and "pretend" I'm sitting with a couple of girlfriends kibitzing about, well, whatever you guys are blogging about. (BTW--LOVE the additions of photos...especially LOVE it when I get to see photos of your "lives", like your homes, hearths, hubbies, etc.)
Anyway, BEFORE I opened your blog and poured myself that first cup of coffee I, cough, cough, turned on the lights of my TWO Christmas trees that are already up.
More than a decade ago, with the kids almost gone from the house, I began to see the writing on the wall...that IF our house was going to "sing" Merry Christmas it would be I, and likely I alone, who would make it happen.
No more having the help of three strapping sons--they'd likely be busy building lives of their own. And, forget the hub. After 35 years of marriage I've given up on exorcising the inner Scrooge out of the man.
So I bought two three foot (deep breath here) pre-decorated and pre-lit trees that came in lovely pounded coppery-bronze containers. I tuck one on top of a stand behind a couch in the living room so it looks like it's five feet tall and the other sits on a buffet in my dining room.
That was so easy, I added a pre-lit, pre-decorated wreath to match and hung it outside. Then I simply pulled out my beloved creche, stockings-for-the-mantel, Christmas plates and mugs, and called it good. VERY good.
Now, because we have family who sometimes only sees us at Thanksgiving, ALL of the above is in place (complete with Christmas music streaming from my music collection) well before Thanksgiving. Our Thanksgiving turkey is traditionally eaten on Christmas-tree-decorated china. The table is trimmed in red and green linens and boughs.
For some reason this tradition has brought comfort and calm to my household. If someone can't be with us in the latter part of December, not to worry, they'll "feel" like they were by virtue of our Thanksgiving-Christmas.
And, it goes without saying, since we winter in Arizona and leave two days after Christmas, I (and I alone) can pick everything up and tuck it night-night back in its box in less than 30 minutes. Now that IS a merry Christmas!
And same to you all!
"Warmly,"
Ronna Snyder, author
Hot Flashes from Heaven
I always enjoy your conversations, Jane and Betsey. I am still a tree purist, but rather than cutting it down we get it at HOme Depot. I have to have one that SMELLS.
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