Rick Watson headline
It’s Christmas time at the Watson house. My wife, Jilda, and I have funny ideas about holidays. We like to celebrate Christmas at Christmas.
We have friends and family with grandchildren who are so excited that they put the tree up at Halloween. Usually by Christmas afternoon, they are sick of the tree.
We wait until the second week of December to get our tree. That’s always a fun day.
We have a tradition of selecting live trees with root balls that we plant on New Years Day.
Years ago we bought our trees from Frye’s Christmas Tree Farm, which is deep in the country even where we live.
The first time we went out there, I became quick friends with Mr. Frye and found that he was in the Army too. Like me, he’d spent a Christmas in the Panama Canal Zone.
The trees we bought from him are now well over 30 feet tall.
He got out of the tree business some time back, so we had to find a new source for our Christmas trees.
We located a place a few years ago and headed out early to Pine Hill Farms, which is a fitting name because it has rolling hills with row after row of trees of all sizes.
This place was abuzz with tree shoppers who walked among the trees and select the one they wanted.
They had a full-sized Christmas sleigh. I quickly coaxed Jilda up on the seat and snapped a photo for our Christmas album. They also have live reindeer, which are somewhat shy but still sight to see.
While we walked, Mother Nature dusted the ground with a layer of snow as fine as face powder.
When we went inside the gift shop to pay, the aroma of hot apple cider drew us to the corner.
In addition to waiting to put up a tree, we refuse to listen to Christmas music until December. We dodge radio stations that play holiday music until it’s the holidays.
When we do start playing, the first record we put on is Windham Hill’s December. It’s an album of Christmas music played on a piano without any additional instrumentation.When I was growing up, my mom always put her Christmas decorations up the weekend after Thanksgiving.
All the kids, grandkids, in-laws and outlaws gathered to put up mountains of lights, plywood cutouts of snowmen, elves, sleighs, and of course Santa.
My mom would spend weeks prior to Thanksgiving making fruit cakes, banana-nut bread, divinity candy, and blocks of fudge as big as a deck of cards. She also made a vat of her world famous Christmas punch, and after the decorations were up, the family would pile into her living room and sugar up.
I feel bad for Thanksgiving. It has always been one of my favorite holidays, but I fear that one day soon it will be known only as Black Thursday where employees are forced to work so that shoppers can fight over cheap flat screen TVs for Christmas.
Call me old fashion, but I’m happy with the notion that holidays are gifts, and for us, it’s not Christmas until December.
Rick Watson is a columnist and author. His latest book, Life Happens, is available on Amazon.com. You can contact at rick@homefolkmedia.com.
