Sale on canvas prints! Use code ABCXYZ at checkout for a special discount!

Savoring the Season

Blogs: #7 of 49

Previous Next View All
Savoring the Season

When it comes to decorations and other things associated with a holiday, some people are like retail stores - eager to put it all out at once, usually months in advance. Others are so caught up in their daily lives the date arrives almost before they know it. (Confession: for years, especially when I was working, that was me.)

Now that I'm retired and, more importantly, a grandmother, I have more time. Our five-year-old granddaughter visits every other weekend, and we're making memories together. We enjoy them the most when we draw them out and savor them, so to speak.

So this weekend we contented ourselves with the crèche, various table decorations, the Christmas books, and a nighttime drive to see the lights.

The crèche has sturdy, unbreakable wooden figures that she moves around as she quietly retells the Christmas story, embellishing it as only a child can. "Move over, Wiseman, you're knocking my sheep over."

The decorations include two large wooden deer, three much smaller deer that she calls "hay deer" because the forms are covered with a green, grassy fabric, and five evergreens cut from barn siding, much too small in scale to go with any of the deer. Scale does not bother our granddaughter in the least, and all of them end up on the same end table because the hay deer go to visit the big deer in the forest.

And on the dining room table are the five wooden angels that belonged to my mother. This year the porcelain headed German angel joined them for their performance. She was the teacher and they were the kids. One of the little angels even went to the bathroom (why not??) and the teacher had to send another after her to see what was taking so long LOL

The Christmas books can be but sampled in a weekend - I read them to her two, three, or four at a time, two or three times a day. We only read the ones with pictures in them, and we only got through about a third of them. Grandpa read her several, too; I listened as they started.
- "Frosty melts, Grandpa."
- "How do you know? I haven't read it to you yet."
-"I read it before! I remember from last year."

And the Christmas light drive was made even more special this year by the fact that it began to snow early in the evening - a lovely, fluffy snow that turned the night into a winter wonderland. When we got home, she spent 30 minutes walking around in the yard leaving footprints, and the next morning was even better. Enough had stuck (and it was wet enough) to build a snowman the next morning- her first.

Next time we will put up and decorate the tree. And wrap the presents for her family (we bought them over Thanksgiving weekend). And read more books - lots more books. And two weeks later we will end our celebrations with presents and a special dinner and taking down the tree. Yes, drawing it out and savoring the season works perfectly for us.