C is for Christmas Morning

Merry Christmas everyone! Hope everyone has a nice day, even if they aren't celebrating...enjoy your day off!

After our Christmas Eve supper we bundled up, for it was already raining, and went to look at lights. The ride up Mount Paran Road was rather a bust, as "Mr. Inflatable" must have gotten read the riot act from his neighborhood association, for there were only two small inflatables on his lawn, and more tasteful lighting. :-) And nearby, the "dueling houses" from last year aren't dueling anymore because one of the pair is empty and for sale. The other was lit quite brilliantly in white, though. We did find some garlands and bows and wreaths, and a few colorful displays, but mostly white, or white and gold.

But so many houses didn't have any decorations at all or were quite dark. The economy? More occupants who don't celebrate Christmas? Maybe just apathy?

The working-class neighborhoods were much nicer. We noticed this even when I was a kid: the decorations on the "rich" homes tended to be spotlights on the wreath on the door, where the blue-collar neighborhoods went all out. Maybe the electric bill in January was horrendous...but, hey, we looked beautiful!

And then came my favorite part of Christmas Eve: watching The Homecoming! Love this movie; have loved it since 1971...looks much more gritty and country than The Waltons ended up.

Then we were sleepy and wandered off to bed...only to be woken by the alarm on my phone at nine. Remember when you were kids on Christmas morning, how nothing could keep you in bed after 7 a.m.? How could you wait so long? Breakfast? Are you kidding me?

So I clicked on the television for Schuyler and I swear this morning Today was more commercials than show. Ye Gods. There was an animal sequence with Hoda and Kathy Lee and Julie Scarpitta: Kathy Lee was cuddling a sloth through the entire segment; it did not want to let her go. In the meantime Hoda fed it bits of pineapple and it looked happy. Well, happy for a sloth. There was also a reindeer named Holly and two penguins who wandered the set with a "what the heck is this?" expression, and two lovely otters who dug into their Christmas boxes enthusiastically and feasted on the resulting fish. Goodness, I wouldn't have wanted to smell their breath.

James made me wait anyway; he fixed biscuits which I had with butter and he had with homemade country sausage we bought at the last of the Farmer's Market (and Willow as always had her own biscuit, as well as doggie snacks, and Schuyler devoured her Christmas gift, a short sprig of millet, in minutes), and we had little cinnamon rolls from Trader Joe's, and then we opened gifts. The fids gave him the DVD set of Firefly and I bought James a copy of Superfreakonomics and a new GPS unit. It's a Garmin, so now he can go out on the town with Nutcrackers looking for curling matches (and hopefully miss the creepy clown on the roundabout). LOL.

(And hopefully this one won't send us down anymore dirt roads or tell us to turn where there isn't a street...)

He gave me the book companion to Ken Burns' The National Parks, a colonial couple cross stitch he bought at Valley Forge, and a time turner—it's a piece of jewelry, but it comes with a display case. Pity I can't make it work...I'd dial it back to vacation and do the last month and a half all over again! Where did the time go?

So we have been sitting watching A Christmas Story—and the birds at the feeder: the male red-headed woodpecker greedy at the big feeder, and two titmice sitting like little statues on the mount, and the white-breasted nuthatch eating upside down—and James called his mom, and now A Charlie Brown Christmas is on and Schuyler evidently likes the Guaraldi score 'cause she's singing along and James is starting his corn casserole...