On to Christmas

These $1.88 poinsettias from PayLess Drugstore will help get me in the mood, that is if they don't die in the next few days. Sometimes the cheap ones do that. Christmas is a big deal at our house. Buying a messy tree, pulling the boxes of decorations out of the attic, etc. And part of the holiday tradition is complaining about all the work.

My Christmas chores on Thanksgiving weekend are:

1. Pull the set of holiday china out of the laundry room closet and wash everything (mice?)
2. Take all the blue china downstairs so there's room for the Christmas dishes upstairs.
3. Find the box of Christmas Cd's in the basement, then try to find a place to put them.
4. Put lights on the outside arbor. Weather permitting.

Every year, something new happens to make putting up the lights aggravating. Now I expect it, so it isn't so bad. As soon as I had them connected and wrapped neatly around the arbor, a section of the first string went dead. I yanked them all down again through the clematis, and then gave the string a good shake which brought it back to life. For now.

(Vigorous outdoor exercise is good on Thanksgiving weekend. John and I were just noticing if a person drinks wine freely and eats three large meals a day including cheese, their pants can shrink in just 4 days. Of course we don't know any people who live like that.)

From the ladder, I had a depressing view of the garden. Everything had that soggy, messy, tramped down look that comes after snow. Or maybe the snow just made everything look pristine for a while? But it was an early freeze, and many plants were gray and rotting. So I spent some time raking, pruning and hosing down. It still looked bleak, but at least a tidy kind of bleak.
Then I pulled these sleigh planters out of the shed, shook out the spiders and filled them up with greens I scavenged around the yard. I bought the planters from my sweet, gruff farrier on a jolly winter day last year when he was out to shoe my horse. He made them in his workshop, and now they will always remind me of Sizzle.
Finally, I kicked the outdoor pots out of the laundry room and put them back in the basement stairwell. Two big jasmines, an immature olive tree, a scented geranium and a weird cactus thing I can't remember the name of that gets gaudy orange flowers. If it goes below 32 or so, I haul everything in and we trip over pots for as long as the freeze lasts. It usually works, although in a few days they look pretty bad and are happy to be released outside again. Outdoor plants hate a dark, warm laundry room almost as much as sub-freezing temperatures.

I hope your holiday preparations are getting off to a good start...