The Day After Thanksgiving

Yesterday, my parents, sister-in-law, and I had our "quiet" Thanksgiving. Tomorrow we will have a Thanksgiving get-together that will include four much-beloved children. It's likely to be less quiet, but even more joyful.

Today, as the day after Thanksgiving, is the first day of the pop-culture Christmas season in the U.S., as opposed to the catholic church year, in which the Christmas season doesn't start until December 25. It so happens that today is exactly one month before Christmas. I got out a nutcracker and my Nativity set for decorations. I already have a rosemary "tree" that I bought at the grocery store earlier this week. It's a potted rosemary plant cut into the shape of a Christmas tree. I hung some small Christmas balls on it and put it on my kitchen table. I hope it lives. It won't get much light.

My full-size Christmas tree will wait a while longer. I get a cut tree from a tree farm and set it up on a weekend approximately two weeks before Christmas. This year it will be exactly two weeks before Christmas. It's good for a couple weeks and then by New Year's or thereabouts when I take it down it's getting dried out. The local Boy Scouts usually do curbside pickup of trees on the Saturday after New Year's, but I wonder if this year they will do it the day before, since New Year's is a Sunday.

I have Advent candles on order from Monastery Greetings. I hope they arrive before Sunday, but I don't recall exactly when I ordered them. I know I didn't pay extra for any kind of speedy shipping, so if they're late, they're late.

It's nice having a four-day weekend. I met a Bellingham friend for breakfast at a restaurant (Hilltop Restaurant) and we caught up with each other. We both hoped to get lots done around our homes this weekend. We'll see how that goes.

I have Pandora playing Christmas music. I started with "Folk Holidays," which I generally like, but then a song came on that I don't know, when what I want are the old traditional songs. So I switched to "Joy to the World" radio where I had to give a "thumb down" to the first selection because it was some type of new, different way of singing one of the old traditional songs. The next two have been okay. It's so hard to find the perfect station. See, when I listen to Christmas carols, I just want people to sing them, not interpret them in some unique way. Please don't sing Christmas carols as they've never been sung before; please sing them exactly the way they've always been sung. Is that too much to ask?