You Can Tell it’s Almost Here

Right after Thanksgiving and even before, hints of Christmas start showing up. Usually the stores are months ahead on every holiday and Christmas is no exception.  I really wish the Christmas season was longer. I’m just getting my house decorated, the tree up, my mantle decorated, the nativity showcased. I pretty much love everything about Christmas and I love buying presents and trying to give presents I know will be well received.

A couple of years ago, we gave all our grandsons Hover Boards.  Probably the best gifts we ever have given and the looks on the faces and the “wows!’ we heard was worth it all. They all rode those Hover Boards with ease. I tried getting on one and almost killed myself.

Last year we gave the younger boys jumping shoes. They could wear them and bounce all over.  Also all the boys got hats with beards and/or hair attached that made them all look like lumberjacks.  My daughter told me later that her boys wore the hats and the jumping shoes to the park and everyone was laughing at how they looked.  Another good gift. This year the younger boys are getting something I found online, but I can’t tell what it is, yet.  It must be popular because when I went to try to buy another one it was out of stock everywhere.  All my grandchildren are getting something that I can’t tell yet, but after Christmas I will show you what it is. I’ve been working on it all year. My grandchildren may read this so I have to keep things secret, you see.  This year our only granddaughter and our oldest grandchild announced she was getting married next year. Another great gift for her grandma.

I  have never been able to surprise David at Christmas, but he surprised me one year.  It was years and years ago and I was at home with the children and someone knocked on the door. When I answered it, a man was there who said he had a piano to deliver. I told him he had the wrong house, but he assured me he was at the right one. David had bought me a piano for Christmas!  I was so surprised.  I don’t play the piano well, but I like to try. I never took piano lessons, but I was always playing on the piano when I was a girl. One time the man who worked on the telephone lines told us our phone had been off the hook and all he could hear was children playing the piano and laughing. It was my younger brother and I.  He was a friend of the family and his daughter was my best friend at the time and they all got a kick out of hearing this about us.  Those were the days of the party line so the whole party probably had heard us!

Christmas was so magical when I was a girl.  And there always seemed to be snow. We haven’t had a white Christmas for a few years.  Every year we would take a trip to town and visit the toy store called Veach’s.  It was the most wonderful toy store piled to the ceiling with all kinds of toys, dolls, trains, etc.  I remember one year looking at bicycles. I had learned to ride a bike that Summer when I was nine years old. I learned on one of my older brothers’ bikes coasting down the driveway in the barnyard.  I was hoping for a bike that year and I got one!  It was a blue Schwinn with padded seat and a place on the back for someone else to ride.  I rode that bike all the time up and down the road in front of our house. We lived in the country and there was very little traffic so I had the whole road to myself.  I pretended my bike was a horse galloping up and down.  I was only allowed to go so far.  A friend of mine lived only about a half mile from our house over the hill. If the hill hadn’t been there, we could have seen her house from ours, but even at that, I was not allowed to ride there except on special occasions. My sister lived about a quarter of a mile the other direction and I got to ride to her house. My sister was eleven years older than me and was married and already had a baby so I loved visiting her house.

My dream was to receive a horse for Christmas, Every year from the time I could remember, I asked for a horse.  I would dream of waking up Christmas morning and running out to the barn and seeing a beautiful horse in a stall just for me, but it never happened that way. What happened was that when I was about eleven, one of my older brothers, Fred, knew a man who had two horses for sale. One was a Clydesdale and the other was an Appalousa.  Fred told me if I had any money, he would put up some and buy the horses for me. So we went to the bank where I had a very small savings account and I took out money and Fred added his and we bought the horses.  They were delivered and I was so excited.  The Clydesdale we called Charlie and the Appalousa I named Tornado and he lived up to his name in many ways.  Tornado was a stallion when we got him and stallions have a temperament and you couldn’t trust him to be gentle so Daddy had a vet come and castrate him to calm him down. Otherwise I probably would not have been able to ride him. I rode Tornado bareback all that Summer and that Christmas I got a new saddle!  Another wonderful Christmas.

I love Christmas because it is the time to celebrate Christ’s birth.  We always had a nativity on the table. My daddy had made my mother one and it had a straw roof from straw in the barn.  The figures were made of some kind of material that would break if you dropped them, Mary had a crack on her head where someone had dropped her.  Baby Jesus lay in a bed of straw. A soft blue light glowed in the stable.  I loved looking at it and imaging the holy family having to stay in a stable. A newborn king, no less.  One Christmas after I had had our first little boy, our church did a live nativity and our baby was Baby Jesus. A teen-age girl carried him and I remember hoping she wouldn’t drop him!

I have so many wonderful memories of Christmas. Sometimes I wonder how I would celebrate if I was all alone.  I probably would not put up a big tree, but I know I would decorate and listen to the carols and read the Christmas story in the Bible.  It will come, whether we celebrate with a crowd or all alone and Jesus will always be the center of it all.  It really isn’t all about the gifts in the end.

I would love to get a Christmas picture with me and the dogs, but I’m not sure how they will co-operate.  So keep watch and see what happens.

How do you feel about the election? I still believe it is being stolen from our president.  Too many lies are being told by too many people and there are way too many discrepancies in the votes to believe Biden really got more votes than our president.  If is it stolen, we all should be afraid of a government that can do that to us. Even if you believe your guy won.  Just think about it. President Trump got eleven million more votes than he did last election, he got more votes than Obama did his second run for president and yet, Biden got more votes than them both. You got to really kid yourself if you believe this vote count was legal.

Here’s to Christmases past and to elections in the future. May we still have them.  Bye.

 

 

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