As I am all too fond of saying far too often, where does the time go? The end of 2024 is upon us once again. We have been blessed this past year with no health challenges for which we're incredibly grateful. I won't say that I live my life waiting for the other shoe to drop, but my thoughts do wander.
Anyway, we were working on the garden remodeling right up until the second week of December. The excavator was carefully put back in the tiny shed until spring last weekend (how that big thing fits in there is really amazing) and the snow blower is on the tractor and ready for the first blizzard.
Winter has been rather mild so far, we've had a sprinkling of snow on and off which had melted, but as of now we've got a few inches on the ground.
A few weeks ago, Audrey and I had a rousing game of something loosely akin to ice hockey on the frozen puddle of the remains of my late parent's basement. In hindsight, and as a stately grandma, you'd think I'd know better than our mutual use of rocks as pucks kicked across the puddle at each other's goal line, but this was a hastily thrown together scrimmage and time doesn't wait for acquisition of official equipment. I can assure you, however, nothing keeps you on your toes more than ducking flying granite while balancing on ice. Don't tell her parents. Shhh...
Audrey was a big help to me in decorating again this year, she's always ready for a challenge, and getting ornaments untangled and my fake trees assembled is something I really need help with.
The Christmas village was set up with precision, something her dad and Uncle David enjoyed when they were children, too.
I have some Christmas wrapping to do yet. I made candy yesterday, not that we needed it. The damages include chocolate covered peanut butter balls and a rendition of my mother's potato candy. I looked through all of her recipes but couldn't find it. After a search of the internet, I found something similar.
'Boil one small Yukon gold potato, mash it with no salt or butter and add powdered sugar to the potato until it forms a dough.' (Which takes an alarmingly large amount of sugar to accomplish.) 'Then after forming the dough into balls, dip in chocolate' to complete the completely unhealthy creation. It had been probably thirty years since Mom made them and now I can see why. They are pretty good, but I'm going to keep looking for her original recipe.
Downstairs is decorated with all the old stuff I've had since we were married 46 years ago. Mom trundled off the boxes and suitcases of ornaments to me with an almost palpable relief way back then, "Here, I'm done putting up all of this stuff. It's all yours now."
She was done with full-scale decorating by the time she was 58. And here I am, still muddling around at 66. Good thing I have Audrey!
As I write this, I am sitting upstairs in the 'glow' of what was the last of Mom's Christmas trees, an 18" tall green plastic dime store purchase made when she was in her late eighties. The little tree served her very well until the Christmas of 2016, when she was 95. She didn't live to see December 2017.
I found the tree in a garbage bag in her storeroom when we were clearing the house out before demolition. She'd left a few tiny 'Shiny Brite' ornaments on it, some the size of marbles, which she'd had from her very first tree as a bride in 1941.
Mom loved 'twinkle lights' which were a new thing for us back when I was a girl. The big, old light bulbs they replaced, oh those things! If you're old enough, you may recall the ones, the buggers that got so hot they burned the flesh off your fingers if you touched them and threatened to set the live tree on fire, especially as it started to dry out. As a girl, I kept my presents tucked under the tree until we took it down in January and was guaranteed to have needles down the back of my shirt and in my hair every time I reached for them.
Anyway, Mom's little tree is not so much twinkling as it's flashing on and off like a cheap hotel vacancy sign at the moment, and I'm seriously wondering if I can locate the 'twinkle bulb' culprit and replace it with a steady burning bulb.
One thing I know about Mom, she wouldn't mind.
Merry Christmas!
