Saturday, November 29, 2008

30 Days of Thanks: Day 29

Today I am thankful for...Christmas decorations.

I am admittedly a "damn Yankee" - a Yankee who moves South and then refuses to leave. My parents moved to North Carolina from Massachusetts when I was 5, my sister was 2. Our formative years were spent in the South and I consider myself more a Southerner than a New Englander...although I do still have a taste for coffee ice cream, prefer a rocky beach to a sandy shore and still call ice cream sprinkles "jimmies."

I do remember how every year while I was growing up my mother would proclaim (and probably still does) surprise at the overwhelming Southern tradition of putting up your Christmas decorations immediately after the Thanksgiving meal is over and taking them down practically after Christmas dinner. My mother's northern tendencies always had us putting our tree up slightly later and taking it down on or after New Year's Day.

Since getting married, we have tended to follow my mother's lead. I have never put my tree up before December 1st, although we do tend to put it up on the early side of the season simply because we're always gone for Christmas and want to enjoy our decorated home as long as possible.

Well, with the shortened time frame between Thanksgiving and Christmas this year, and the fact that it's raining and we're home alone for an unprecedented four-day weekend, we went and purchased a Christmas tree this morning. I'm eagerly anticipating getting the house decorated this afternoon and explaining it all to peanut as I unwrap each ornament. I'm not sure how much he'll retain this year or how much to explain to a two-year old about a nativity scene, but I'm excited nonetheless.

So today, I'm gonna:

"Haul out the holly;
Put up the tree before my spirit falls again.
Fill up the stocking,
I may be rushing things, but deck the halls again now.
For we need a little Christmas
Right this very minute
Candles in the window,
Carols at the spinet.
Yes, we need a little Christmas
Right this very minute."

1 comment:

Liz Jimenez said...

How fun! The whole ritual of decorating the tree (with the John Denver/Muppets record playing in the background) is something I do miss after the whole converting-to-Judaism thing. :-) But since we spend Christmas with my family in Chicago, anyways, it seemed silly to get a tree even before I converted. I'm a little sad my kids won't grow up with that, more for the festivites than the religion obviously, but we'll come up with our own traditions. Heck, I can still make the same cookies and just find blue sugar, right? :-)