Holiday cheer

I had to get that depressing piece moved down. I mean come on, it is the time for festivities and good cheer and rum laden egg nog. But I haven't even decked my own halls yet this year. I'm behind and just can't seem to get the decorations up the stairs from storage and flung about. You see it's been a bit of minor remodel hell in my house since before Thanksgiving. Nothing gigantic... well gigantic to the pocket book but not monumental in the Extreme Home Make Over way, just new carpet and some tile. This weekend is the weekend. It's the weekend that finally all the carpet repairs are done, the tile sealing is finished. Now I can move my furniture out of my dining room and back into the other rooms of the house. I don't know if it was the twenty-three boxes of books, three bookshelves, a couch, TV, and over various bathroom supplies in baskets or the inability to find a square foot on my dining room table to actually eat at that caused me to breath into a paper bag. But the thought of adding tinsel and lights to that caucophony was enough to send me into a full panic attack and make me want to run down the street screaming and pulling my hair out.

I'm breathing. In/out...In/out...

Ok, I'm better. Baby steps.

#1 move the furniture back into rooms... then put up the tree.

The tree. The Christmas tree, that is what I really wanted to blog about. One of my favorite things at Christmas time when I was growing up was the fresh pine tree decorated in my mom's forbidden living room. As a kid you were sure that if you dared go in that some silent alarm would go off alerting your mother and resulting in a boomerang shoe coming around the corner to knock you flat in your tracks. If the silent alarm didn't go off then the carpet would give you away because of the perfect vacuum lines in the shag carpet any trespass would leave the trail of your footmarks that wouldn't take Sherlock Holmes to figure out "Who done it". Except at Christmas time, then you could step into the gold speckled living room and even though I always expected to hear a heavenly host sing as I crossed the threshold it never happened. At Christmas time the silent alarm was off and the carpet well traveled, my brother, sister and I would go in there to stare at the kaleidoscope of colors and lights that seemed to mesmerize you on the tree. Some of my fondest childhood memories are of Christmas time, sitting in the forbidden room.

Though I can't think of one room in the house where my children don't crawl, climb or reside I still want them to have the magic of that Christmas tree. I guess because my kids only have one childhood and I want to provide them lots of opportunities for memories besides ones of me asking 1 billion times if they've brushed their teeth or aimed in the toilet.

Happy Holidays!