From our house to yours ~ Wishing you a very Merry Christmas!

My parents– especially my mother, for I know it was her innate ability to go deep in denial and enjoy the fantasies out of books and movies–loved to give us kids a magical Christmas. I think of what trouble my parents went to–deeper in debt, for one thing. They drank and felt badly, so they bought us more stuff, but you know, I always knew it was that they wanted us to be happy. To this end my mother would wrap every tiny present, knowing a child’s joy of opening them. She does this now for her great-grandkids. My mother has the wonderful talent of being able to know just what silly little toy a kid will like. I think maybe it’s because there lives yet within her the child who, no matter her heartaches, sees the wonder of Christmas. I’m grateful for her teaching me that.

During much of my childhood we lived in Alaska and would trudge out to the woods to cut our tree. It was always decorated in the old-fashioned gaudy Victorian manner of my mother’s childhood (I’m not certain my poor father ever had a tree as a boy; I didn’t know him well.). We had glass balls and a little china Kewpie doll from my mother’s childhood, and remember that thing call tinsel? It was like shredded aluminum. We had so much of it on the tree that the bows bent down. But, oh, how magical the tree looked, when you turned out the lights! And when the tree came down after New Year’s Day, my mother made us take the tinsel off for her to save it in a big box to use the next year. We probably had ten years worth of crumpled well-used tinsel in that box. (When I went to practice this same tinsel-thrift the first year of marriage, my husband was horrified.)

This glass ornament from the WWII years had no metal, only red and white stripes, faded and worn, and well loved.

I find myself actually missing that box of tinsel this year, in the way we do when Christmas comes and we remember the silliest things. Do they even make tinsel anymore? Still, the old glass ball (vintage WWII) and Kewpie doll of my mother’s childhood are on our fake tree. We make new memories with them, explaining to our grandchildren what they are, and of course the kiddos eye them as if they may have a disease. But this is our Christmas, and we love it.

All through the year, I am blessed, informed, delighted by your blogs and sharing with me. Thank you so very much.

I close these rambling thoughts with a quote from the psychic and faith teacher Edgar Cayce. I clipped this out so long ago that the paper has yellowed~

Then, as ye give so do ye receive. As He hath given, the love of the Father to the children of men is manifested in that spirit of Christmas–Christ-mass — that which may now be raised to that consciousness, that level above man’s way of thought, man’s concept of force, power or might; and that the real strength, the real hope, the real contribution is in that still small voice within.” ~Edgar Cayce.

Blessings,
CurtissAnn