'Tis the Season

It's now December 1, and while the retailers kicked off the Christmas shopping season a month or more ago, I've been holding out until after Thanksgiving to start bringing out the decorations and playing Christmas carols. Don't get me wrong, I love the Christmas season, but I get Scrooge-y about the rampant commercialism. But post-Thanksgiving, we really get into Christmas. No radical house decorations timed to music or anything, but plenty of festive things to help us celebrate Christ's birth.

Yesterday, Trudi and I put up the lights across the front of our house. They're the icicle style lights, and I wish I'd invented them. Makes our house in-yo-face festive! I think Trudi and I are getting this down to a science. Climbing up and down a ladder a bunch of times and crawling around on the roof are way down on my list of fun things to do, and I can sometimes get a bit testy. But this time things went really smoothly. Long as I was up on the roof, I cleaned out the gutters, which had filled up with leaves from the birch trees, and brushed off moss that had begun growing in some of the shadier spots.

I also played my Christmas playlist on my iPod yesterday. Just let it run in shuffle mode. I've got well over a hundred carols, ranging from instrumentals and contemporary to Cajun and R&B. Every year I try to pick up a CD or two.

We'll get our tree this weekend, probably at the Nativity tree lot, which always seems to have a good selection of noble firs, which is the style of tree that we like. Lots of sturdy branches for hanging ornaments, and after 30+ years, we've got a bunch of those. In years past, we had to hang the breakable ornaments up high, out of the range of our lab's tail. This year, we'll have to protect the tree from our mobile, insatiably curious and determined granddaughter, Lori! And speaking of Lori, we may well go a bit light on the inside decorations this year... at least the ones that would be in reach of the kid. I just saw a video clip of Lori starting to climb up on things. Yikes!

More to come, including favorite movies, CDs, recipes and Christmas traditions.