Rocking Around the Christmas Tree

We’ve been dragging our feet putting up our Christmas tree. Thanksgiving was celebrated early this year, and it seemed putting up the tree on November 23rd was just wrong … way too early. And then, the house has been a wreck as we were still repairing and recouping from the water heater leak. We waited till December 1st for our tree decorating. It’s been years since any of us had a tree and we had to rummage around to see what we actually had to decorate it. Some of our boat ornaments were just old and tired or really inappropriate for the tree … a little Panamanian flag, a mini Argentinian bolo, a tagua sloth?

We salvaged some old ornaments from the boat and Mary bought some new ones.

We salvaged some boat ornaments; I found more at the local thrift shops; Mary purchased a few new ones. We bought a couple garlands and, of course, we bought a tree … a 7.5-foot ‘slim yuletide pine’ from Hobby Lobby. Not like the old days of tramping into the woods with all the kids to find the perfect tree (which was always way too tall for the house once we got it home), dragging it a mile back to the Blazer, manhandling it up to the Blazer’s roof and tying it down for the long ride back home. No, this was pretty painless. Open the box, connect three sections of faux-pine, plug it in and the clear LED lights sparkled to life. Voilá … instant Christmas tree. Perfect for geriatric sibs!

Mary donned her elf hat which made decorating much easier.

We didn’t really ‘rock’ around the Christmas tree. It was more of a slow shuffle aided by glasses of wine and chocolate-covered cherries … you know the ones that always show up at this time of year. Alexa played Christmas music … Michael Jackson was singing ‘I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus’ (the original was sung by little Jimmy Boyd … that dates us, huh?). Dean Martin and Bing Crosby and Andy Williams crooned holiday classics interspersed with Madonna’s ‘Santa Baby’ and a little Christmas rap (not wrap!). We sang; we hummed; we quizzed each other on Christmas songs and artists.

Decorating the parrot for Christmas took an intense amount of concentration.

David had to coax the gas pilot in the fireplace to life before ‘the stockings were hung with care’. We all sat in the living room for a little while, watched the fireplace and admired the tree. It’s was a satisfying, nostalgic feeling to contemplate a well-lit, decorated Christmas tree of our own and share old memories and tales of holidays past. We ordered Chinese food and settled in to watch a Christmas movie … a fine beginning to our holiday season.

The stockings were hung by the gas fireplace with care.

I woke during the night and tip-toed into the living room. The tree, still lit, blazed brightly in our dark, quiet house. My heart skipped a beat. The child in me wondered if maybe Santa will find us this year.