I managed to get almost all of it done. I finished my shopping December 24th, and reaffirmed my belief that you need to finish your shopping MUCH earlier! I found bags or boxes for everything but the trike, and we just put a big bow on it. Not all the gifts had bows on them, but no one seemed to care.
There were two things I didn’t get done. I managed to get about half of my Christmas cards mailed this year. The unfinished ones were waiting for a longer, personal note to be included. I guess those friends will either get New Years cards, or St. Patrick’s Day cards, or maybe Memorial Day cards. If you live in the U.S. and you didn’t get a Christmas card from me, you may still find one coming your way.
The other thing I couldn’t clear the decks to do was to wish all my on-line friends a Christmas wish. If you come to read my blog, or if you are a friend from my chatting days, I hope that you had a wonderful Christmas with your family and friends. I hope that you find Peace and Joy in the coming year, and that our friendship will continue through the years.
Happy Holidays!

Just little thoughts here and there….
The table in the casual dining room, the room we call the Green Room, has been cleared off. Tomorrow, I’ll wrap one more gift for our granddaughter, an over-sized chalkboard, and then I’ll cover the table with a red cloth, and set out candles.
The cans of Christmas cookies and the cinnamon dough ornaments were given to our friends at the salon on Thursday. I had to do errands, so I missed what they had to say, but I understand the cookies were well received.
We have received an embarrassment of riches from the contractors and suppliers with whom we work. One sent a stunning white Poinsettia, two have sent fruit baskets. One woman, a long time friend, has sent me an amazing collection of spa products. I won’t ever have to buy anything to pamper myself again!
Tomorrow at 8:00 I have a hair appointment. I’ve never had someone do my hair on Christmas Eve before. It seems like a nice way to start the day.
I have to pick up two gift bags to wrap (read: hide) our exchange gifts. Otherwise, I think we finished shopping today. The traffic was hideous. Thank goodness it was a beautiful day. I could have worn a heavy sweater and left the coat behind in the car.
The older couple who lives on the other side of our grove have one of those Santas that is filled with air from a compressor. Wait until Elegante Mother discovers that it’s there! Maybe I need to keep a tape recorder handy.
One of the local hawks has been hunting at our feeder. I thought about stopping the feeding, but then all the little birds would suffer, not just those that get caught. I think the hawk is using the reflection off the Green Room windows as part of his hunting strategy. I haven’t looked in the bird book to see what kind of hawk it is. I know it’s not a Red-tailed Hawk. It might be a Coopers Hawk.
Dear Husband has all the gifts organized, or most of them. One stack is for Christmas Eve, one is for Christmas morning, and the last is for Christmas Day. I haven’t told him that there are two bags of black oil sunflower seed in the trunk of the car. I figured the birds deserved a Christmas present, too.
I don’t know if I’ll have the chance to come back to blog on Christmas Eve, so let me say that I hope all of you have a wonderful Christmas. We hope you are well, and happy, and that you will have peace and good fortune in the coming year. Merry Christmas to you all!

Have you ever been at a point where you can’t make a decision?
I find that when I have a backlog in the office I have that problem. The solution is to sort through everything on my desk and organize it into levels of priority. I separate personal and business things. Then I take the business material and sort it into several stacks: things to be filed, bills, things which require my attention and things which can be thrown away. Once I get into that sorting mode everything falls into place. Occasionally I fill a box with things that don’t fit any of those categories and that’s a really bad move. That box will hang around waiting for my attention for a YEAR! Better to deal with things right away, than to let them build up.
I wonder if that’s a metaphor for life….

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(Raising my hand…) Ahem….I’d like to change my vote, if I might.
I come from a rather prolific family. My four siblings have thirteen children and eighteen grandchildren or so. And Dear Husband has four children and now two grandchildren, and the children and some of the grand children are married, so there are spouses to consider….and on and on and on….
Today, I realized that a wrapping room is not as bad an idea as I first thought. For the past two weeks both dining tables in my house have been covered with wrapping paper, tape, name tags, gift bags, ribbon of all texture and (taking a deep breath) gifts.
Someone else who has a large extended family must have decided that they would like to see their dinner table during December, or maybe they wanted a place to stash all the gifts until the big night….er…morning….ummmm DAY!
We have a stash of gifts to take with us on Christmas Eve that will fill the trunk and back seat and a couple of laps. Then there’s the stash that will go with us when we visit Dear Husband’s side of the family. And there’s a smaller stash for us to open Christmas morning. Sounds like overkill, doesn’t it.
If I had planned a wrapping room for this house, I would have added a freezer to store cookies and shelves to store Christmas cookie cans! My house has been disrupted for days between the cookies and gifts, and I’ll be very happy to get it back. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t mind giving my family gifts. I just need to be more organized about it.
So, maybe that wrapping room wasn’t such a bad idea after all.

Well…that’s not quite the truth. No FRESH tree.
Dear Husband seems to be allergic to evergreens. Each year when he puts up the Christmas tree, he’s swathed in a zipped hoody sweatshirt, in an effort to keep the sap off his arms and back.
This year we will not be hosting any holiday parties. I don’t know how that happened, it just seemed to evolve that way. I’ve been out to dinner with the Quilting Bee, and the exercise group met for brunch at our exercise leader’s home. We’ll be spending part of the Christmas weekend with family. It seems that this was the year for everyone to go in different directions.
So, our decorating has been proceeding at a slow pace. The other night I turned to Dear Husband and asked if it was important to him to have a “live” tree. He shrugged his shoulders and tried to weasel out of the question. I took pity on him and said that since we weren’t having the family here, we might consider not putting up a fresh tree. After all, we have three fake trees in the front half of the house. That ought to be enough.
We decided that the fake trees were adequate this year. So, in a short conversation we resolved the issue of having to clean up the pine needles from the trees being carried in and out. And no one has to worry about watering the tree. I can water the Norfolk pine and ficus trees instead (which won’t have to be moved), and pile presents at the base of their stands. It’s possible the Christmas tree skirt might drape around the base of the pine.
I’ll miss the wonderful scent of a Frasier fir, but I won’t feel guilty watching a beautiful tree die. Merry Christmas, Mother Nature!

I envy those of you who are organized enough to have your house decorated and Christmas gifts purchased and wrapped by December 1st. I bet you’ve been enjoying the season while the rest of us have been running around like crazy people!
I tend to decorate gradually, rather than doing it all in one day. I’ve been thinking about what it must be like to survey your home for almost a month, enjoying the seasonal decorations. Elegant Mother is in the habit of taking her decorations down on New Year’s Day. If I did that, I’d barely have one week to enjoy the completed decorations, so I let it linger just a bit.

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Wednesday, December 7th was Elegante Mother’s 89th birthday. We didn’t plan a special activity this year, but did a number of low-key things, instead.
In our household, the birthday person gets to choose where we will go out to dinner to celebrate their birthday. We went to dinner on Tuesday night, thinking that the storm might make travel difficult on Wednesday evening. EM chose a small chain called “Redstone.” They serve American cuisine and feature a lot of wood smoked or roasted items. She chose to take home a huge chunk of bleu cheese encrusted fillet, so that she could have the flour-less chocolate cake with raspberry coulis.
Wednesday morning, my siblings and some of their children called to wish Elegante Mother a happy birthday. One of her granddaughters (the one from the car crash) picked her up to do some Christmas shopping, and then I met them for lunch at the mall.
My niece went on from there, and I was in charge of getting EM home again. I wanted to make a stop before we left the mall. Unfortunately, it was the full length of the mall away from where we had eaten lunch. Elegante Mother was up for the trek, because it ended at Christopher and Banks, one of her favorite stores.
My errand was to buy her a sweater. Since there was no way I could do it without her knowledge, I put her to work, and we shopped together. Mother has always said that she was easy to buy for. Just be sure that it’s red. We ambled through the sweaters, and I picked up one for her approval. When I realized it was on sale for half price, I held up a second. She liked them both, and we were out of the store in ten minutes. She’s my kind of shopper! I left her seated near the entrance and hiked back for the car. By then, it was time for both of us to head home.
She told me the cutest story on the way home. It seems that my youngest sis called to wish her happy birthday after I’d left the house. The cute part was that she had her entire classroom shout “Happy Birthday, Mrs. ———‘s Mother!!” so that Elegante Mother could hear it over the phone. And then she did it again when the bell rang and her second class was ready to go. Cute, huh?? I hope the kids had as much fun with it as we did.

I’ve been a long time recovering from the cold that took me down after Thanksgiving. I’ve been short of energy, and interest in anything that required concentration or commitment. So, I was relieved to have a sense of second wind last night.
We were watching “National Treasure” on cable. I realized about half-way through the movie that I could iron and watch at the same time. The ironing basket has been overflowing since Thanksgiving, and one of the things I wanted to do was to get things ironed so that we’d have napkins and linens should we do any spur of the moment entertaining.
I was about two-thirds of the way through the basket when the movie ended. Frankly, it gave me such a boost that I sent Dear Husband off to bed and took care of the dinner dishes on my own.
I also did three loads of laundry, cleaned off the counters, finished a little office work, and planned the chores that needed to be done today. By then, it was 1:00 and seriously past my bedtime.
I can feel my “clock” getting out of sync with my life. I almost had the 5:00 rising down pat, when I stayed up until 2:00 in the morning. It only takes one of those days to wipe out all your good intentions. I’m on a medication that makes a good eight hours of sleep almost a necessity, and it’s hard to do when you’re up until 2:00 and you have to be out of the house by 8:00.
Still, I feel very virtuous about having gotten so much done. It spilled over to my day today, and kept right on through the evening. Tomorrow, we start wrapping gifts, so I’m glad that I got so much cleared off my plate.