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This will make four in a row!
(Just wander in from Holidailies? There's an introduction to the main characters
down towards the bottom of the page... just scroll down.) |
The Holidailies prompt for today ("Describe your holiday decorating techniques.") was submitted by Bev, so naturally I had to respond. The problem is that I am not sure that the word "technique" could be applied to my holiday decorating.
I like real trees. Not just real trees, but real trees that we have cut
down and brought home. I also like very large real trees. Nancy prefers
small trees, but since usually Jill and I bring home the tree, they tend
toward the large size. (Oh, okay, so most years after we get them home
I have to shorten them so they won't hit the ceiling.)
Nancy usually hangs a decorative wreath here or there, put some seasonal
themed hand towels in the bathroom most often used by visitors, and (if
this can be thought of as decorating) there are lots of homemade Christmas
cookies
around.
I think we were more organized and standardized about this when the kids were actually kids. We used to put various decorations up around the house: hang the Christmas cards we received on a green cord using little green and red clothes pins and decorate the entryway into our living room with them, drape Christmas garlands around the fireplace mantle (where, of course, stockings would be hung on Christmas Eve... to be filled by Santa). And I would string lots of colored Christmas lights on the hedges by our front porch. A local charity sold luminario kits -- a package of a dozen or so white paper bags and an equal number of votive candles. I would get three bags of them and on Christmas Eve we would set them out along our sidewalk and down our driveway to our house. On years when most of the houses on our block did the same thing, the effect of all of those small white bags with candles burning in them was quite magical.
What we do now varies from year to year. Some years I put lots of white
lights on the front porch and the bushes in front and sometimes not so
many..
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| This year is especially chaotic around here because of the new hardwood
flooring we are having put in the kids' rooms and the upstairs hallway.
The old-wall-to-wall carpet in Jeremy's room has been pulled up and Nancy
got some painting done today. Jill still has some stuff in her room that
has to be moved before we can rip up the carpet in her room. (Not to mention,
we have to figure out where to temporarily store everything that is in
the three hall closets so we can rip up that carpet and paint those walls.)
In the meanwhile, there is a pile of hardwod flooring in the living room
and I have no idea how I can make room for even a small tree until we have
the upstairs ready for the flooring installers to come and do their thing. |
Maybe we can hang ornaments here? |
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I usually like to have a tree up as early in December as I can, but this
year it is likely to not get put up until just a few days before Christmas.
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| An introduction for those of you wandering in here from Holidailies
for the first time: I'm just a middle-aged guy (but somehow I hit 65 on my last birthday) who
lives in Rhode Island with my wife Nancy (a middle-school math teacher), daughter Gillian
("Jill" -- 26 yr old baker and part-time college student), son Jeremy (23 yr old
restaurant cook and part-time college student), and Tiger (senior citizen cat). Eldest child Adam
lives in New York City with his wife Leah and our grandsons Sam and Milo. I'm a programmer/systems
analyst who got involved with software training and instructional design. I currently work from
home doing quality assurance and editing on course material for both classroom courses and Web-
based training courses for a very big computer company. I've been writing this online journal
since 1996. |
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