Trimmed trees and hung socks
How does that poem go again? Something about a trimmed tree and stockings hung up? Well, we’re going to accept approximations of those things and declare the holiday underway. Stockings, hung up? Who ever heard of such a thing?
This year, the tree has been unboxed just in time. None of this thirty days before silliness. I’m a firm believer in short, succinct celebrations – fifteen minutes of fame and all that jazz. The quality of light strings has improved to a point where you can simply untangle the strands and go. None of that testing bulbs for hours on end.
My gift wrapping is done, and I even took the time to label the packages to cut down on guesswork. The dog might feel short changed, but I can distract her with some cheese, or a cookie. Outside, we have enough snow to prove that winter and Quebec City do have a symbiotic relationship. As proof, I had to excavate space for the green and blue bins, just in case the city respects the contract we have, where we trade in tax dollars for garbage disposal.
This morning, I spent the allocation for foodstuffs at M & M, where you can get an amazing variety of frozen desserts and hor d’oeuvres. Sure beats spending hours with eggs and flour in a hot kitchen…
We’ve even cleared off the dining room table, in anticipation of a family meal. In a world filled with computers and papers, a naked table invites backfilling, but we’re going to put our “information vacuum cleaner” lives on hold for a few hours. And to prove that another generation has arrived, when It’s A Wonderful Life came on and someone made a remark about “everyone has seen that a hundred times”, the youngest retorted that he hadn’t, and he wanted to see the ending. That’s the spirit!
