With Christmas the day after tomorrow, I'm vastly relieved that I actually have all (well, mostly all) of my holiday preparations taken care of. True, I still have a few greeting cards left to send out, but I always feel that if I manage to get them in the mail before New Year's, I'm doing pretty well. (After all, it's technically still Christmas...)
I also managed to actually get my trees (all three of them--yep, three!) completely up and decorated last weekend. Nothing like waiting till the last minute, and there was a time or two in this busy season where I almost felt like not bothering. But I really do enjoy my trees once I get them up, and (once I get into it) I even enjoy the actual decorating. There's something to unwrapping old familiar ornaments and remembering where they came from, who gave them to you, what year they represent, etc.
As I mentioned before, I have three trees, each one slightly different. Many of the ornaments on them came from my friend Jeff, who's an interior designer and who also has several themed trees he puts up throughout his house. His home is always beautifully decorated for the holidays (well, to be honest, his home is always beautifully decorated throughout the entire year); and as a designer of sorts myself, I always have to wonder if I couldn't strive to do the same. Jeff's trees are gorgeous in various colors with various coordinated themes, and my trees are a little haphazard, with seemingly unrelated ornanaments in every color imaginable (except for my sci-fi-themed tree--but more on that one later...). Still, though, I do find my down-home tree warm and memorable; all the ornaments have great sentimental value, and in the end I think I'd be sad to do without it at Christmas.
And then there's my mini-tree, with tiny ornaments to match; that one goes together pretty easy.
Lastly, I have my sci-fi-and-fantasy-themed-tree, with all my Star Wars and Marvin the Martian ornaments, and a couple of LOTR and Harry Potter decorations thrown in for good measure. I'd originally hoped to find a black tree with white lights, but those seemed to be few and far between (not to mention expensive), so I settled for a regular green tree with silver stars already woven in, and strung blue lights with the ornaments. It's a small table-top tree that every year I set on top of my piano, and that one usually goes together pretty quickly as well; except this year I managed to drop one of the Darth Vader ornaments down behind the piano while I was decorating, and had the worst time trying to fish it out. Finally, though, with the aid of a trusty yardstick, I was able to retrieve the Dark Lord of the Sith (along with a dozen or so mutant dust bunnies) and set him in his rightful place near the top of the tree.
That takes care of getting the trees up and decorated. :)
Another usual task around the holidays is, of course, the gift shopping, and I just this evening (the night before the night before Christmas) managed to find the last gift on my list. My immediate family can sometimes be difficult to shop for, and this year was no exception. I was having the hardest time trying to figure out what I could give my mom in particular; and so, when I was last home visting the other week, I finally just came right out and asked her.
"Oh, I don't need anything," she replied, as she does every year.
"Yes, I know," I responded, as I also do every year, "but surely there's got to be something you can use."
"Well," she hesitated, "You know, we could really use some numbers for the front of the house, you're really supposed to have those out there for the emergency services to find you..."
"Mom!" I exclaimed, "I am NOT getting you HOUSE NUMBERS for Christmas!!!!"
In the end, we decided on bedroom slippers; and I actually did get some nice house numbers which I'll wrap and put under the tree. (I also got some really cheap peel-off paper numbers, just as a joke, that I'll present first--she didn't say what kind of numbers they had to be ;)...)
So...bedroom slippers. You'd think that would be pretty easy to find, and in retrospect if I had just ordered them on line immediately, it probably WOULD have been easy. Yet, glutton for punishment that I am, I felt I could find them with no trouble at any of the various department stores in my home town, and pretty quickly learned the error of my ways. Four stores and a week and a half later, I still hadn't found the type of slippers she wanted, and was coming up on two days before Christmas slipper-less. Finally, this evening, I made a final valiant effort to brave the other last-minute shoppers and hit a store or two to see if I could find the elusive blue-slip-on-size-5-machine-washable slipper in question. The first store I checked surprisingly failed to carry this particular slipper; and I was just about to give up and head home to order them on line when I happened to pass by a previously-forgotten mall near my neighborhood.
Now, under normal circumstances, I (and any other well-meaning citizen in Charlotte) would avoid this particular mall like the plague. I'll withold the name out of consideration for the few legitimate merchants who have been able to hang on there, but over the past few years, the place has been the scene of multiple gang crimes; the building stands half-empty, and there are even signs in the parking lot warning that it's a high auto-larceny area (park at your own risk). I generally enjoy seeing the Christmas decorations that retailers put out every year, but in this case they looked very half-hearted, and it was actually pretty sad to see what had become of this once-popular facility. But I was already there, and figured, what the heck, I'd looked every where else, it couldn't hurt to check one last place.
I went in, and needless to say felt very out of place, and more than a little uncomfortable. I clearly was not a member of the target audience the stores there now catered to, and very few of them seemed to be the type of place that would carry ladies' bedroom slippers (or at least, the type of slippers that were fluffy and machine washable). I did discover that one of the anchor stores (OK, the ONLY anchor store) in the mall was a Burlington Coat Factory, and headed into that on my way out of the mall.
When there, what to my wondering eyes should appear, was a display featuring slip-on machine-washable bedroom slippers, blue, in various sizes including size 5. Who'd have thought??? But the best part was that the slippers, normally $30.00, were on sale for--well, I won't give it away for fear of seeming cheap, but needless to say I was very glad to be able find a gift I knew was needed and wanted without breaking the bank. :) I waited in line with the other shoppers for almost half an hour, and was never so glad to get out of place, but it was well worth it.
And so here, the night before the night before Christmas, my trees are up, and I finally completed my shopping. (For the record, I ordered gifts for the rest of my family on line--you'd think I would have learned my lesson.) Now if I can just get my cards finished before the end of the year, I'll actually be in good shape.
Happy Holidays, everyone. :)
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anxious
accomplished
creative
cheerful
contemplative