'Tis the Season!

One of my Christmas traditions is not getting out Christmas decor until the day after Thanksgiving. Some of that is because we have a small amount of Thanksgiving decor to display in the short month between Halloween and Thanksgiving, but also I do not want to rush the Christmas season along. The retailers do enough of that, unfortunately.

While I do get the outside lights put up during a warmer spell in November, I do not light them up until after Thanksgiving has been put in the books for another year.

Kudos this year to Handsome Son, Eric the Tall, and Wonderful Daughter for the big-time assistance in getting the outside done this time around, owing to my physical limitations. Punkin and Punkin Bread also helped do some manual labor in getting boxes from the crawl space. They are always eager to help.

We have collected enough Christmas decor over the years to choke a small foreign country, but as it is Mrs. North's favorite time of the year, this is allowable.

Each year we switch around what goes where, and there are always boxes that go either partially unused, or not used at all, but the decor in those boxes will make an appearance over the course of a few years. We have concentrated the tree decorating to a good combination of handmade ornaments from the kiddies' early years, as well as some ornaments commemorating places we have visited, and adding "name" ornaments as the family grows larger. Thanks, Sainted Mother, for starting that particular tradition. It continues to be passed on to the new generations.

Christmas is always a time of nostalgia, and, for me, nothing brings back that warm, fuzzy feeling like getting out certain decorations. My favorites for years have been the red-and-white children carolers candles holding a Christmas song book; the pine cone snowmen with the plastic hat; the pine tree candles; Santa and Mrs. Claus candles; and the snow-covered bottlebrush shrubs and pine trees in several sizes.

The candles have never been lit, only used as figurines.

Last year when my Mother-in-Law came to live with us, one of her myriad boxes included more of the carolers, a few snowmen candles, and some deer candles, which I had not seen before. Though she is no longer with us, her carolers and other candles figures have once again seen the light of December's days, and will for many more years to come.

A couple years ago, The Stache bought me a few lead figurines very similar to ones we had when we were growing up. He found them at a flea market, or some such. A man pulling a sled, on which can sit either a mother and child combination, or a larger, adult-like figure. There was even  "rope" for the man to pull the sled along. This year I made it more difficult for the man to pull the sled, as I have managed to put both the other adult and the mother-child combo on the sled together. Let's hope it isn't uphill both ways in the snow for him!