More work than a dozen elves could manage!

As if laboring over yards and yards of tangled bulb-laden green wires, placing spot-lights and marshaling ‘Holy people’ into their camping locations on the front law was not enough work for one weekend, ‘she who must be obeyed’ took to round two the next day – on the INSIDE of the house. I say ‘she’ took to it, because as noted in yesterday’s narration, I am not allowed to get involved in most of these activities. In her defense, I have to admit, it is a wise decision she has made; I’d probably bugger it all up if I was to lay hand to it.

The aforementioned ‘It’, is the task of retrieving boxes and boxes of ‘stuff’ from the basement and placing a hundred or more items in just the right places! These places include: the mantle-piece, the hearth, the little table in the dining room (that we never dine in), the larger table in the living room (which do not live in) and every one of the nine (9) windows at the front of the house. There are other places too, if you include this door, that bit of wall, and various and sundry corners. Do you have a sundry corner in your home? If so, let me know what is supposed to be in one of them!

So much for the ‘places’; what about the ‘stuff’, you may ask? Well that includes a small streetful of illuminated houses and churches that have been built on the mantle-piece – perhaps by those nut-cracker folk that stand guard there?

There is a wooden Rudolph whose electric nose will alternate between ‘on’ and ‘off’ 799,001 times between now and 12^th Night!  He now (the photo above is from last year) stands next to the Grandfather clock, which upon its acquisition 2 years ago, usurped the long-standing ‘Christmas Tree place’ between the windows (in the unlived-in room) – it now has to stand beside the bookcases which also used to be festooned with ‘stuff’ – like this ‘NOEL’

– you’ll hear more of it  later this week, so tune in again in a few days time.  

The Christmas Tree – yes, that is what we call it, not a blydi ‘Holiday Tree’, mun; WWJD? [add your own lol, pmsl, roflmao, omg, or other whatever-those-abbreviations-are-called, here] – is another story.  It has its own box, which being so heavy and unwieldy, requires my sole involvement in this wintertime metamorphosis madness. It must be dragged up the stairs from the basement, unboxed and erected – such that each piece of (now color-coded) plastic electrical connection assumes the coitus position with its ‘color-mate’. The color-coding idea came to me 2 years ago after a frustrating 45 minutes of attempting to perform physically impossible match-making with each piece. Once that bit is done, I am banished to . . . well, she doesn’t care – as long as I don’t interfere. The 3 boxes of a hundred or so ornaments are placed on the tree’s branches with such perfection that no one could ever find the 3 or 4 little white lights that no longer work – but still permit the one blue light that I put there for the grandkids to seek can still be located – eventually!

The Family Room (where we do most of our ‘familying’) is where the fireplace is of course, and also is the place where we choose to place one (of three) Nativity ‘sets’. That way, as we sit in front of the fire and the TV, we can still keep in view, through those wooden, plastic or ceramic figurines, the ‘reason for the season’.

Though we do participate in the secular aspects of the ‘holiday season’,

we recognize that the gift-giving that all too often seems to take precedence these days, is merely an extension of that expression made by the Magi to the greatest gift we were ever given, the Christ-child so long ago, so far away – away in a manger.  

In Wales, the land of my birth, we say ‘Nadolig Llawen’ – Happy Christmas.

Here hoping that you, and everyone in your home, will have a blessed Christmas.