Decorating for Christmas

Well it’s the Christmas season. It is official because it is after Thanksgiving. I agree with Darrell Patterson, www.wanderingamerica.com, that Christmas officially gets kicked off with the Thanksgiving Day parades and NOT the day after school begins. I must confess that I am an avid Christmas decorator. I got that “bug” naturally because my Mom always loved to decorate for Christmas. One of the “emotional” aspects of full-timing for me was the dilemma of what to do with half of an attic full of Christmas “stuff.” I certainly don’t have a 2400 square foot house to decorate. So what’s a girl to do?

Last Christmas, as I was busily decorating, I told Mike that this was getting to be a big job. It took us one entire evening to get the things down from the attic. Then it took the better part of one to two complete days to get it all set up. Then comes the trees. Yes, I said trees. We had three. One, all clear lights, in the living room. One, multicolored lights, in the den and one small “sports” tree that I had set up for our son years ago and you got it, tradition, means we put it up each year. By the time I got all the inside completed came the hanging of the greens outside. We put wreaths at each window, candles in each window and our sweet little deer, two of them, in the natural area. The entire time I am doing this I am thinking about how much work is going to be involved in putting it all back up in approximately four weeks. It was about this time I looked at Mike and confessed that now I understood why my Mom and his started to do less and less each year. Gee, I thought all this time they were just being old scrooges. Not so. It all looked nice when complete but oh the work that went into getting it that way.

Did it make Christmas more meaningful? Not really. It was just something I did each year. On cue right after Thanksgiving I just did it. This year was going to be different. How would I survive without the week of hard labor to get in the Christmas spirit?
Well…. we put up a 4 foot tree (because I couldn’t find a 3 foot one) and I went through all our ornaments and picked out the ones that were “special” and mostly nonbreakable. We added a string of LED lights in the windshield. The steering wheel table was draped with a Christmas cover and one of my favorite Santas stands on it surrounded by cotton snow and clear battery operated LED lights. I put the rest of my Santa collection on the desk/credenza with a few nutcrackers. I laid some multi-colored battery operated lights around them. A couple of pillows and I was finished. It took me all of about an hour from getting out the Christmas tub to turning on the lights. The lights add so much color, it makes the motorhome so warm and well…. Christmassy. I am not tired and stressed out and I haven’t wondered one time how much work would be involved with putting everything back up.

The motorhome looks nice and festive. The city of Pine Mountain is all lit up to support Callaway Garden/Resort and their Fantasy in Lights. Mike and I have walked downtown several evenings and just enjoyed the moment. We spent several hours at the Callaway Christmas Village which is soooo nicely decorated complete with wonderful music. We look forward to our drive through Fantasy in Lights before Christmas. Several mornings we have eaten our breakfast by listening to Christmas music playing softly on the stereo system in the motorhome. Our son has even put up his “sports” tree in his apartment and it feels good to know it has found a new address, his address, just as it should. Yes, it is Christmas and it is all good…….life is good.