On the Tenth Day of Christmas...

...it's back to the $#!$#$!#$! fluorescent lights.

Meanwhile the holiday period has brought back more than Christmas memories:

Every year there's a Christmas episode I get "attached" to and watch several times. In 2005 it was The House Without a Christmas Tree because Mom and I had watched that a lot together.

This year it was the original Christmas episode of All Creatures Great and Small, "Merry Gentlemen." I watched it about a half-dozen times, including once late New Year's night. I think it was because I was feeling a bit homesick after hearing about my godmother, and the halls of Skeldale House and especially the old den and the dining room with its old-fashioned wallpaper put me in mind of all the triple-deckers and old homes of my relatives. There is a scene where Tristan goes into the kitchen with a candle and you can hear the wind "wuthering" outside and the draft guttering the candle and almost feel how cold that stone-floored kitchen was with the stove out in a home that was not centrally heated.

Reminds me of the days when houses weren't as draft-resistant as they are now. You almost never hear the wind blowing around our new home; it has to be gusting hard and then more what we hear is the snap and rattle of the banner outside on the metal flagpole. We had radiators when I was small and I remember the windows turning white with feathery frost patterns on cold mornings in the window that did not have the radiator in front of it; the one near the radiator would be thick with condensation (which dripped into the wooden frames and necessitated the replacement of the windows in 1971).

So does anyone else remember plugging up the front door for the winter? We didn't use our front door in the winter at all; Daddy shoveled the front walk so the mailman could reach the box, but we didn't use the door. It was opened twice all winter, once to put the Christmas wreath up and then to take it down again. A couple of winters we just left it up until spring. You used to be able to tell old New England houses, in fact, by the old Christmas wreaths on their doors into March because their front doors were blocked up. Our front door faced north, so the blocking of the door added extra warmth to the living room. The cracks would be stuffed with strips of old flannel pajamas. Some folks took the precaution of covering the front door, storm door and all, with clear plastic sheeting that was scuffed and transcluscent by spring, but my parents thought that looked ugly.