Lighting the night

But, much as I enjoy the neighbors’ lights, I enjoy this house even more. I love that star on their chimney and all those decked-out trees.

I’m just grateful I don’t have to go to all that work. But these lights pale compared to some people’s light shows. Most of us don’t have the cash to pay for thousands of lights and the sound/sequencing equipment necessary to do Griswold lights bumped up numerous notches. So we just enjoy looking at them on YouTube:

Our neighbors’ Christmas lights put ours in the shade. I so enjoy looking out the window at theirs, especially since we won’t have to pay the light bill. Neighbors decorate for most holidays, but they pull out the stops for Christmas.

Santa Claus wore brown

Our tree was nearly bare of presents during the run-up to Christmas. I wrapped and shipped our packages without ever putting them underneath the tree. Even though our tree is covered in ornaments and its base is surrounded by our Christmas village, it looked barren.

Then, what to my wondering eyes did appear but a big brown truck, without the eight tiny reindeer. “Santa” was dressed in brown, not in red. Up to my porch and back down he sped. I hardly could catch him in time to say “Happy New Year” as into the truck he did climb.

I placed the packages under the tree, until Hubby woke up and opened packages with me. To open gifts we were so excited and with the gifts we were so delighted.

Obviously, poetry is not my strong suit, but Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.

A very redneck Christmas

Marilyn writes about her boss’s Christmas gift in her best imitation of redneck style.

As our admissions team considered a nice (or not-so-nice) Christmas present for our Director of Admissions, ideas flew through our office like reindeer on a mission! The result was the Ultimate Redneck Survival Kit, a gift we knew Gary would be so happy to receive. Not only did this gift have its hilarious aspects, most of the items were very practical, and they may become a lifesaver! As Tiffini and I put together this lovely gift set, our excitement grew. On the day we packaged the items, we were laughing so hard, we could hardly contain ourselves! (Yes, some people are easily entertained!) Of course, one needs the Ultimate Gift Box in which to place the lovely items. An old cardboard box with duck-taped edges came to our rescue! In Tiff’s best Redneck style, she wrote, “Redneck Survival Kit” on the side. Inside the box were some unusual gifts, each wrapped in their own special gift bag: a lovely brown paper lunch bag! Each gift came with a set of instructions, so that Gary could figure out how they were to be used. Hopefully, those in Redneck Land will appreciate Redneck Survival Kit instructions: A man who is outside in every kind of weather needs a Redneck Weather 4-Caster. We made it from a large block of wood with a twig duck taped to the side of it. We found some bright red yarn from Grandma’s sewing basket to hang from the twig. In our best Redneck handwriting, we listed possible 4-casts: *If yarn is swinging side to side, it’s WINDY. *If yarn is wet, it’s RAINING. *If yarn is white, it’s SNOWING. *If yarn is still, it’s STILL. *If yarn is gone, TAKE SHELTER! Yes ma’am, every Redneck needs one of those! Then you have the Redneck Wynd Chyme. Find an old board about 3 feet long, and gather those darn beer cans left in the yard from the last party there. Yessirree, then take some good ol’ wire and wrap three strands of it around the ol’ board. Then take those dirty ol’ beer cans and wrap the wire through the tabs. HEY, NOW, THAT’S ONE NICE WYND CHYME! Gary is quite the outdoorsman. He goes motorcycling in the summer and snowmobiling in the winter. We wanted to make sure that he was cared for on his outings. Every snowmobiler needs his own set of munchies. We found some Rodent Roughage that sure looked and tasted like those salted peanuts at the local farm stores. We came across some Reindeer Turdz that sure did look like chocolate-covered raisins. Then there was the all-important Fish Bate. That sure did look slimy, but it tasted just fine, kinda like those gummy worms the kids like to eat. Now Tiff is quite the city gal. So she found Gary some good ol’ sushi! Yessirree, she sure did! That was the best-tasting sushi I’d ever had. Kinda reminded me of sugarcoated gummy worms! I could eat quite a few of those myself! That Tiff was really a-thinkin’ about Gary’s safety out there in them bitter-cold mountains on that snowmobile, yessir. In case his brakes went out, she made an Emergency Snowmobile Brake. She found this red brick in her backyard, and tied some of that there bright red yarn around it. If Gary throws it out in the snow, hopefully the brick will catch something in a short time, maybe a tree root, and snowmobile will come to a screeching halt! Of course, a man could get lost in them there mountains on a snowy day. A Redneck GPS system sure could come in handy. This little bag contained what could be mistaken for sunflower seeds. The instructions said, “Leave a trail of these behind you so that you can find your way home. If the seeds are gone, hunt down that darn rodent who ate ’em and KILL him!” Oh there ya go! Sure ’nuff, no one should be without a good ol’ GPS. Of course, we all know Gary’s quite a b.s.-er. What snowmobiler isn’t?

We made him his very own B.S. Bag. The instructions on the little brown bag said, “When the B.S. starts to flow, blow into this bag. The B.S. makes good fertilizer. Spread it on your yard. Can be used around lawyers offices and political scenes as well.” Then we made B.S. Filters. They are to be used when the B.S. Bag just isn’t enough. This bag had little black pieces of what tasted like licorice. The idea is to blow through the little holes and then eat it. Oh my, that was one nice little gift. One day when we were looking around the office, we came upon a bunch of what appeared to be a stack of old wedding rings. As we wondered where on earth those came from, we realized that this Slinky-like gadget must be all Gary’s old wedding bands. Yessiree! So being the nice pals that we are, we put them in this box right where they belong! We also found some Lady Hookers. Yeesirree, you take a box of them there cute little candy canes and use ’em to hook you a gal!

And then we made up a document that Gary might need again one day. Yep, some Day-Vorce papers for ol’ Gary. Now that was quite the document. Instead of copying it all here, ask Gary to show you. You will enjoy it much more that way! So as I sign off from Redneck Land, I wish each of you a very Merry Christmas! As you work in your back yards this summer, keep in mind that many of the little things out there can be put to good use next Christmas! Everyone has a Redneck pal somewhere!

Recycling decorations

Some years ago, we received this basket as part of a holiday food package. I loved the basket, but wasn’t sure what to do with it. It was too pretty to throw out, so I kept it in storage, waiting for inspiration.

A couple years later, someone gave us a rosemary plant as a hostess gift. It was decorated with these fun picks. I kept them as being too pretty to throw out, but didn’t know what to do with them, either. They, too waited for inspiration.

Last year, the light dawned at last.

The basket even had gold-wrapped florist’s foam in the bottom. All I had to do was cut apart silk poinsettia and holly bushes and shove them and the pics into the foam. Voila! Instant flower arrangement!

And I got to enjoy the virtuous feeling of having recycled something beautiful, and we get to look at something beautiful.

12 Days of Christmas plates

Several years ago, I ordered a set of miniature plates featuring the Twelve Days of Christmas. When they arrived, I got out hammer and finishing nails and was about to pound 12 nails into the woodwork above the arch separating dining room from living room. My mother was appalled. “You are not going to put all those nails in your beautiful woodwork, are you?” “Why? Do you have a better idea?” “No, but I bet I can think of one.” So off we went to the craft store.

She bought four little fences, some silk holly, red ribbon and a glue gun. In about 15 minutes, she had made these decorations. I was impressed. Every year, I unpack them gingerly and carefully check each plate before hanging each fence. Each year, at least one must be reglued. Once the plates are all secure, I check the string, fluff up the ribbons and hang them. I always breathe a sigh of relief when all is back together and on the wall.

Angel on the tree

This angel is the first tree-topper I remember. I have a picture of it from Christmas 1968. I remember Dad lifting me so I could place Angel on the tree. Since I have black hair, I always had a special affinity for that angel. And, of course, I was always such a perfect little angel! (Please ignore the horns holding up the halo.)

I always looked forward to placing it on the tree. My angel made the tree mine.

As the years passed, Angel began looking rather shabby. Her face had a large smudge on one side. Her robe became increasingly dingy. Her wings were dirty.

Finally, my mother had had enough of her rather pathetic appearance. I helped her put up and decorate her Christmas tree that year. When we pulled Angel out of the box, she told me to throw her away.

“She’s worn out,” Mother said. “Get rid of her.”

Mother wasn’t very sentimental about such items.

But I am.

I was horrified. I didn’t want to throw away my angel! “Do you mind if I take her home? I think I can clean her up and use her to top my little tree.” I didn’t have a good tree topper for that tree anyway and what topper could be better than Angel?

I brought her home, carefully washed her robe and gently scrubbed her face and wings. Angel was as good as new. I was thrilled to place her atop my tree. She now presides over our dining room every Christmas, our angel we have seen on high. Now if I could just get her to sing “Gloria in excelsis Deo!”

Stockings hung on the door frame with care

I love vintage fabrics and lace and I love Christmas decorations. When I saw stockings made from old quilts and lace at a craft fair years ago, I had to buy two of them. They fit so beautifully in our old house (built in 1929). When my parents came to visit us that year, my mother noticed the stockings. I saw the wheels churning in her head as she examined them. I took one down for her and she traced around it.

When we came home for Christmas the next year, we saw her version of those stockings, one for each of us. She had quilted long strips of fabric, then cut stockings out of them. Note how careful she was to originate a strip right on the heel curve. My mother loved such details. She embroidered each name on green fabric, then stitched it to the cuff. Dad gave me the stockings last year. He didn’t think he’d be hanging them and thought I would enjoy them. I get a huge lump in my throat every time I hang them. My mother’s legacy.

Check out A Very Mary Design’s Adorable Packaging Giveaway Contest.

Boo and the Christmas trees

Mr. Boo Kitty loves Christmas. Or maybe he just loves the Christmas trees!

As soon as we put up the trees and cover the base with a tree skirt, Boo has to curl up underneath them. He seems to favor the little tree during the day and the big tree at night. He doesn’t climb the tree or swat the ornaments as he did when he was a kitten. I do tie the little tree onto the sideboard so he can’t knock it off and we hang fragile ornaments out of the kitty’s reach, just in case.

When we began putting the Christmas village under the big tree last year, I thought Boo would no longer be able to curl up underneath that tree.

I thought wrong.

He daintily between the houses and curls up around the tree pole. I think of Azrael chasing the Smurfs. “Papa Smurf! Papa Smurf! Azrael is looking in the window! What are we going to do?”

Azrael/Boo Kitty doesn’t seem to notice any village dwellers. He just snoozes amid the buildings.

Unfortunately, Boo’s black fur shows up rather too well on our little tree’s white skirt. The big tree’s skirt is red and green, so the fur isn’t as obvious.

The white skirt is the first tree skirt I remember. It was originally just a piece of white felt cut to size. My brother and I received the stockings as Christmas gifts a couple years apart. (Mine is visible at far left.) For several years, our mother hung them from the door between our living and dining rooms.

I remember her standing in the doorway examining them. I wondered why. A few days later, she bought red and green felt. She cut out red felt bells, felt holly leaves and berries. She top-stitched the stockings, bells and holly to the skirt, then added Christmas ribbon around the skirt edges.

Several years later, she decided to make quilted tree skirts for herself, my brother and me. She stitched red and green Christmas fabric triangles for the top, then added a red ruffle around the edges. Bottom is the red fabric. Skirt ties in back. Since she would no longer be using the original tree skirt, I asked for and received it.

Boo Kitty loves them. And so do I.

Christmas party

We hosted our annual Christmas party Saturday night. I like to have eight at our table, but we ended up with six (clockwise from left): Tonya, Linda, Marilyn, Hubby, my empty chair and Stacy. We love to entertain any time of the year, but especially at Christmas. The house is always so beautiful with all our decorations. The light of our trees and candles gives the dining and living rooms a warm, relaxing glow. And, of course, the food is always wonderful.

I always make the Christmas menu cards more elaborate than for other theme dinners. This ribbon decorated one of our gifts last year. I kept it for future use, not knowing what I’d do with it. As I waited for Hubby to escape a very ill-timed Saturday morning meeting, the design leaped into my head. After cutting ribbon, I lit a match and melted each end to prevent raveling. I had intended to secure ribbon to menu and name cards with knots, but my paper punch’s holes were too large. I had to tie three knots on top of each other before ribbon remained in hole. That took too long. Instead, I taped the ribbon to the cards. That method didn’t look quite as nice, but, as Patty says, life is a series of trade-offs. As I look at design now, perhaps I should have dangled the ribbon on the card’s other side. Whatever. Guests loved the cards. That’s what matters. The two menu items that are partially obscured were “Cranberry-Orange Pork Tenderloin” and “Out of This World Cranberry Salad”. We didn’t eat the salad. We intended to serve it with the pie, but we were too full. So we took it to our church’s Christmas dinner the next day. They devoured most of it.

Borax ornaments

I subbed in a physics class Friday. While students were creating bridges from balsa wood, I started preparing a borax solution for their borax crystal ornaments. I asked the teacher what strength of solution I needed to make. He said, “Just stir in as much borax as the water will hold.” He had left a box three-quarters full of borax, a Dutch oven and the bottom of a double boiler. I filled the pots with water and put them on the stove. As I heated the water, I stirred in borax. When the borax dissolved, I added more and continued stirring. Eventually, I poured in the entire contents of the box. When the water started boiling, I removed it from the heat and poured it into three beakers. After they had cleaned up their bridge project, students began shaping pipe cleaners into ornaments. Students tied string around their ornaments and a colored pencil. We suspended the ornaments in the borax solution.

When the basketball teams returned from their game that night, coaches were to remove the ornaments from the beakers. Picture shows how we hope they turn out.

The Gift of Christmas Is Jesus

My friend Martha is amazingly creative. To decorate five of our church’s windows for Christmas, she found a theme, then asked me to design each window using that theme.

The local lumber yard cut foam insulation sheeting to size for her, then she affixed 1x1 boards to each end for hooks. She wrapped the boards in Christmas wrapping paper. Once I emailed her the designs, she printed them on transparencies, projected them on the wall and cut out the silhouettes from a different roll of wrapping paper. She and Kim glued them on according to my design.

Martha bought white contact paper for the letters. I cut the letters with a Cricut machine and placed them on the wrapped board. Even using a yardstick, I couldn’t lay them exactly straight. I was frustrated. Hubby asked, “Do you want them to look handmade or as if some machine had made those posters?” I felt better.

We hung them with a chain from hooks in the ceiling.

Wendy had made beautiful, lighted flower arrangements for the entryway. Our church building is still under construction and the ugly construction materials were visible behind those arrangements. So Martha brought backdrops and hung fabric on them to hide the ugliness.

Our tree looked ready for the landfill, but she rescued it, too. Winding garland between the branches filled in the tree, vastly improving its appearance.

I love her ideas.

We are conveying the true message of Christmas to passers-by in a beautiful fashion. Jesus is the true Gift of Christmas. All other gifts are shadows of His great Gift to save us all. We only have to accept that gift, the gift of eternal life.

Decking the halls

Our entire long Thanksgiving weekend is prescheduled. All I get done is to help make/eat Thanksgiving dinner and decorate for Christmas. Everything else takes a back seat. Laundry and dishes stack up because I’m too busy taking down and putting up the décor. Who wants to wash when she can decorate?

By tradition, no Christmas decorating can start in our house until Thanksgiving Friday morning. But, after that, our house looks as if we’re getting ready to move.

Dad was surprised at the extent of our seasonal decorating efforts. “You even change the pictures?”

Who wants to look at the same pictures all year? Not us!

We used to have floor furnaces. When they died, we installed a natural gas stove downstairs. Floor furnace grates are now our vents. The vent just visible in lower right corner became our “hatch”. It sits right above our storage rooms where nearly all our decorations are stored. I carry the boxes up a ladder and hand them to Hubby.

Passing boxes through the hatch is much easier on my knees than going up and down our spiral staircase. I’d hurt for days afterwards. And I had several nasty falls.

By the time we erect and decorate two trees and nearly every horizontal surface in our dining and living rooms, I am very ready to collapse into my recliner and enjoy our handiwork.

Santa Tree tops sales chart

Marilyn and Tiff’s Santa Tree fetched top dollar at Saturday’s Big Brothers/Big Sisters fund raiser auction. It brought $160.

Auction’s total proceeds were $800. Director Wendy said that was double the proceeds from last year. She was very pleased with the auction’s results and is looking forward to next year’s auction.

Marilyn and Tiff’s boss congratulated them on representing their college well in the auction.

'Tis the season

This elf is busy making Christmas gifts. Since I know the recipients read my blog, I can’t share these projects with my readers until Christmas Day. That’s a long time to wait, but I’m not going to spoil any surprises here.

I enjoy making my gifts. Making the presents seems more personal than just going out and buying something. When I create the gift, I feel that I am adding more love to it than I could if I just bought something. Not only am I giving the item, but I’m also giving the time and skill, the care and thought required to make it. Besides, creating something is much more fun than fighting crowds at the store.

“’Tis the season to make presents! Fa la la la la, la la, la la. AH!”

The Santa Tree

Our community is hosting a live auction this weekend to assist Big Brothers/Big Sisters. The project is designing a Christmas tree and then letting it be auctioned off at a local craft fair, with proceeds going to BB/BS.

Two little elves in [Marilyn’s] office gladly jumped on this project!

Tiffini and Marilyn excitedly went to the shopping palace in town: Walmart! There we jingled our way up and down the aisles that were laden with new Christmas ornaments! As we gave consideration to what theme our tree would be, our heads were full of lollipops and sugarplums! As Christmas tunes played over our heads, we slowly gathered our thoughts and re-focused on the project at hand!

We picked out our tree first: a white, pre-lit 5-foot Christmas tree. We then looked at all the new ornaments hanging on the display racks and decided to go with a Santa Claus theme.

As we packed our sleigh with ornaments of all sizes and shapes, we felt the Christmas spirit rise inside us! We found ornaments that were painted like Santa’s tummy, complete with a big black belt! We found red and white frosted garland, and red and white ornaments, as well as a red cozy hat for the tree topper!

Elf Tiff came up with a plan for covering the legs of the tree stand: two pair of SIZE 9 WOMEN’S BOOTS!

The reindeer flew us back to the office, where we assembled the little white tree. As we added more and more ornaments to our tree, passersby would stop and ask us why we had started decorating so early! We also got comments on why we chose a white tree.

When it came time to put the boots on the little tree, we put our heads together and came up with a great plan: we cut the boots open in the back so that they’d slide on the legs easily. We hot-glued them back together and then made cute red ribbon decorations to glue across the tops of the boots. Red bows were then glued onto the sides of the boots, complete with some tiny jingle bells!

The little white Santa Claus tree is now sitting pretty inside the front door of the office, waiting for the trek across the street on Saturday. That afternoon, she’ll be auctioned off with the proceeds benefiting a good charity.