3 Things My Family Lost This Christmas
Well, we didn’t actually lose them — we were just too exhausted to hunt them down.
Farewell, 2020. Here’s your hat — what’s your hurry? Close the door behind you on your way out.
In our slow shuffle this Christmastime, we didn’t get around to tree shopping until Fred’s Since 1956, a local landmark, had sold out and boarded up for the year. The traveling men, and their axes and pine trees, had vanished. It felt like a dark moment from “It’s a Wonderful Life.”
The nursery in the next town had one straggly Charlie Brown tree standing. We settled for a pricier potted evergreen, which doesn’t wobble (bonus!) and can be planted outside.
During the time of Covid, the year we masked and sanitized and did all we could to stay healthy and avoid the virus, we took on the holidays gradually, in small steps. First, a wreath on the door; then, cheery red Santa candy tins near the TV and taper candles on the mantel. We got the tree five days before Christmas and decorated it in stages. Someone was heavy of heart and not eager to trim it right off; someone else, a teen, was uninterested. But we did it. Our favorite ornaments found their perches.
Yet these treasures never made their way out, or showed up late:
- Spode Victorian Pink Christmas plates. The eight mismatched salad/dessert size saucers, some decked with holiday trees and some with reindeer in a moonlit sky, were stacked in the basement. My husband, Dan, thinks it is…
