Ho Hum... But in a Good Way

It's another anti-climatic day after. For some perhaps Santa delivered the gifts that you wanted, and some of us had to settle instead with new underwear. I can't complain. A year ago we were buried under 10 inches of the white stuff with temps never climbing much higher than Zero. I'm basking in a heat wave of 27 degrees today :D Woohooo!

The holiday verdict for this year is that the oversized live Christmas tree was a winner! You don't need to have the aluminum tinsel or plastic white tree to feel Atomic (though there's nothing wrong with those choices either!).


Sure the live tree dropped needles and dried up to being dangerously combustible. And I don't know what was up with the lights. After all 20 boxes of bulbs were finally hung, one light set blew out. I fixed it, then it went out again. And then it took another string along with it. I'd already bruised a rib from shoving the storage boxes back up in the attic with the extra lights. So our tree stood there with a burnt out middle on Christmas.

Family heirlooms on the tree

And for some reason real honest-to-goodness tinsel is impossible to find around here. I tried the new-fashioned non-toxic plastic which the shops were selling instead - it reminds me more of Easter grass than icicles on the tree. Phooie! Next year I'll buy up all the tinsel in July if I have to! But despite all my decorative shortcomings and dead needles on the floor, our Scotch Pine was a cheerful sight to behold and was indeed the loveliest tree seen in this atomic home in years!

Junior did great in the Sunday School Christmas play (and reminded me just how big he's getting now). He'd gotten off easy though. After all when "I" was a kid, we had to dress up in uncomfortable robes and home-made costumes and recite entire speeches before the audience. There was nothing like the gnawing dread I had leading up to the night of the play. It would be begin the day that my teacher would hand me a strip of paper with about 200 lines and tell me to memorize it all. And as I got older and graduated from a Shepherd to a Wise Man, my part became even bigger, with singing even.

Good Grief, Charlie Brown!!

The night of the Christmas play, the building was all dark except for the stage, and one by one we'd take our turns and stand before the crowd of family and friends and all those strange faces we didn't know stretching back in the pews as far as we could see. I don't remember too much of taking the stage, after I started to open my mouth... it was all a blur. Then suddenly it would be all over, just like that. The organ music would play and I'd feel a tremendous weight lifted. I was FREE! Then we'd scamper off downstairs to dig in to the homemade fudge and sugar cookies and punch. And before we went home we'd each be given a paper bag filled with peanuts in the shell and Christmas candy and more fudge.

After the end of his play, Junior ran off downstairs with his fellow actors and dug into the cookies and fudge and fruit punch in those little white Styrofoam cups. He got his gift bag of peanuts and candy too. And it's kind of comforting to know that despite all the drastic changes made in this world over just a short few decades of my own lifetime, that some things and some traditions remain the same.

Now the Atomic-powered bachelor pad household has made it through another Christmas season. Now lets get ready to bring in a new year.