jimsjournal
The halls have been decked -- 12/16/06


Fa la la la la

We finally finished our Christmas decorations last night. Jill and I did most of it -- Nancy was exhausted and went to sleep and Jeremy was in Massachusetts visiting Katie.

(Yes, I'm standing on a chair, but it isn't one of the new dining room chairs -- er, I mean evening eating room -- it's one of the old ones. Actually, it's a chair I usually have in my den so Tiger can sit and look out the window.)

We needed all of the ornaments this year... that tree is very wide.
We tend to go for tradition and sentiment rather than elegant aesthetics. It's not that we don't have some elegant ornaments -- some of them are antiques nearly a century old and many are older than I am -- and we have some beautiful ceramic ornaments made by Nancy's sister Clara (I do not know where she finds the time -- each year she makes an ornament for every person in the family and, if you've looked at any of my Thanksgiving entries, you know that is a large and growing group) -- but many decorations are put on more from nostalgia and sentiment that aesthetics. That colored construction paper chain, for example, dates to Jill's childhood.
The house ornament that has been my favorite since I was a very small child. (My brother also has a similar house ornament.) One of Jill's many favorites... this is a "Baby's First Christmas" ornament for 1982, the year she was born. This is another one from Jill's childhood -- a kindergarten art project from St. Thomas Aquinas School -- That's her photo.

Tiger hasn't attacked any of the ornaments (although we still try to keep ones that might attract his predator instincts above his reach). However, he can't seem to resist brown paper bags.

We had stored each set of Christmas lights rolled up, placed in a brown paper bag (lunch bag size) and then all of the multi-colored ones in one plastic supermarket bag and the white sets in another plastic bag. Tiger pounced on one of the empty paper bags and shredded it, ripping off pieces with his teeth... Ferocious jungle beast!

And, I finally added some white lights to the porch railings to go with the electric candles in the windows...



Blasts from the past -- entries for this date from previous years:




This is my Holidailies entry for December 16
th
A brief introduction....
A brief introduction to anyone who wanders in here for the first time from the Holidailies site -- I'm a middle-aged (*cough* okay, 63, but I don't look a day over 62 ) guy who lives in Rhode Island with my wife Nancy (a middle-school math teacher), daughter Gillian ("Jill" -- 24 yr old college student), son Jeremy (21 yr old college student), and Tiger (senior citizen cat). Eldest child Adam lives in New York City with his wife Leah and our grandson Sam. I'm a former programmer/systems analyst who got into doing software training and currently works from home doing quality assurance and editing on course material for both classroom courses and Web-based training courses. I've been writing this online journal since 1996. (If you read some of the archived entries, until a couple of years ago I used fake names for the kids -- "Sean" = Jeremy and "Jennifer" = Gillian)



previous entry

next entry

To list of entries for 2006


To Home (Index) page


|

Weblog Commenting and Trackback by HaloScan.com