This morning I decided I was going to walk down to the newly opened Jessie’s for a TEC (Taylor, Egg & Cheese) breakfast sandwich that I’ve been craving for months now. Remember Jessie’s that burned down? They have reopened in a a different space: a restaurant that went bust just a few doors down from where their old place used to be. It’s right at the bottom of the hill on the main road that we live off of. We’re glad to have Jessie’s back! I’m not certain if they are going to rebuild in their old spot or not. For now they are renting the building.

This location has been three different restaurants since we’ve lived here. Most of the time it has just sat vacant. Every time we’ve seen a new restaurant open up we get excited since it’s so close to us. We eat there once and think meh. When they put up a sign that says “On Vacation” we know we won’t be seeing them again. It was a grill, then a pancake house (basically diner food) and most recently “Mexican” (I use that term loosely to describe their food) called El Rusty Anchor. The bars associated with the assorted restaurants always did a lively business but the food has never been great.

The last owner even planted a palm tree in the front to go along with his Mexican theme, which as you can see does not like life in northern New Jersey. It thrived the same way his restaurant did.

It’s a nice walk, maybe 3/4 of a mile? And here was my reward. Yum! I don’t indulge in these very often but they sure are tasty.

My walk took me past Green Turtle Pond which was placid and reflective this morning.

Alongside the road the woods are brown brown brown right now. Still pretty. But very brown.

This sign caught my eye and I thought it was funny.

I was hoping that the walk would help to burn off the calories I consumed but probably not! It was a nice walk either way.

Shadows on the wall created by our lighted garland on the stair banister.

We spent a quiet weekend hanging out around the house mostly. It was mostly foggy and drizzly all weekend long. Pretty gray. It’s still foggy out there this morning and in the mid 40’s. Today we’re supposed to get thunderstorms and more rain with temps in the 50’s. Not exactly wintry Christmas weather! It does this to me every year it seems. It taunts us with a few small snowfalls early on, then zip. So far so much for their predictions of a heavier-than-normal snowfall for this coming winter. But … it’s not winter officially yet and to their credit they did say it would mostly occur in January & February. Last year was so disappointing in the snow department that I was hoping it would make up for it this year. Patience, Lynne.

On Saturday we finished decorating the tree. To make up for the lack of snow outside we created our own snowstorm on our tree by decorating solely with the crocheted snowflakes my Mom made for us.

Alex helped with this photo.

Our neighbors (Aileen with the chickens) had their annual company Christmas party at their house yesterday. Every year her husband hitches up his big John Deer tractor to a large flathead trailer and they take their guests on a “hay ride” minus the hay. Last night it was foggy and drizzling when I let the dogs out after dark and happened to see Bruce driving the festively lit trailer up from their barn. I waited a few minutes, then went and stood on my front step. When I saw them coming I flashed our outside house lights three times and as they drove by waved and shouted “Merry Christmas” as the people on the trailer stood up and waved and shouted back. The sound of carols drifted along behind them as they made their way down our street. Sweet.

I am also hoping to catch Fire Truck Santa when he makes the rounds this year. We’ve missed him so many years in a row now it’s sad. The first year we saw him I thought someone’s house in the neighborhood was on fire when I heard the sirens, but it was just our volunteer fire department making the rounds with Santa strapped to the front of the engine. Here is a video of another version of Fire Truck Santa in our town in 2010. Funny, heh? I hope to catch him this year as he drives by our house and get some photos. Here’s hoping!

Small town living—you’ve gotta love it!

I’ve been drinking a lot this. I caught Rick’s cold bug and have been trying to shake it now for a week or more. It’s not the flu, just an annoying drainage down the back of my throat combined with laryngitis, a hacking cough and just a general malaise. I’m ready for it to be gone!

Today we are supposed to have freezing rain, my least favorite wintery precipitation. It makes the roads slippery with black ice that you can’t see and you don’t get much out of it moisture wise. It’s just nasty.

So I’ll be sticking pretty close to home today. I have the bone from our ham that we baked on Sunday (we’ve been having ham all week in one way or another) and I’ll be cooking the bone with split peas for Split Pea Soup tonight. I think I might even make these oh-so-easy-and-super-tasty rolls too.

Bring on the freezing drizzle and more hot tea and honey, please!

The faeries have been decorating the Thorn Queen’s Kingdom of late. See the lights back in the woods?

They are really droplets of water left behind from our rain yesterday with the sun shining through them, but I like to think of them as something otherwordly. Like the Thorn Queen.

But if you squint your eyes up they become faerie lights and not just droplets of plain water.

Squint a little bit more … there, that’s it.

And you might just see something very special.

And for you non-believers out there, this is not the first time I’ve sighted faeries in my woods. Check this out.

I will be the first to admit it, I am a picky Christmas tree person. I know this is hard for you all to believe but in Colorado the cut trees were so-so. In the past they had not shipped in trees from other states and the pickings were slim. I never did like those spindly prickly white pines that were not even a “Christmas green” but a sickly pea green complete with cones. The Douglas firs (when you could find them) had branches too wimpy to hold ornaments.

A few years before we built the cabin we would head up to our land and cut a tree. Our house that we had built had cathedral ceilings and I always had a penchant for a really BIG tree. One year we cut one from the land that dwarfed our Tahoe. It was so big it was hanging off the roof so that we couldn’t see very well out the side windows. People kept passing us and giving us friendly waves and thumbs up. We had to anchor it to the wall! But it was probably the biggest and most beautiful tree we’ve ever had.

After a few years we started to feel bad about cutting the trees so we bought a really high quality (expensive) 12-foot pre-lit artificial tree. It was a bear to put together since the sections were really heavy. Ugh. When we moved we brought it with us figuring we could always use it by taking a section or two out since our ceilings here are only 8-foot.

The first year we quickly realized the artificial tree was just not going to work. The fresh tree options here in New Jersey were staggering! So many pretty trees! The first year we bought one from a chain garden store, Max is Back. It was a nice tree and it only took a few minutes to pick one out. The second and third and fourth year we cut our own from Bear Swamp Farm which is close by. It’s not a tree farm, just 15 acres of kind of rugged terrain in which they have scattered many varieties of trees. Some are in rows, other are not. It was not as easy to find a tree that fit the standard but we always came home with a pretty one. It was fun but we got lazy (or something) in 2010 and just bought one from our local garden center here in town.

Last year we cut one from an actual tree farm. It was pretty much perfect. Each tree looked just like the next and we wandered around dazed and tree-blind.

When Rick asked where we were getting our tree from this year I said I didn’t want to go back to the tree farm. He said why not? they were all perfect. I know, I said. That’s the problem … it was too perfect. Trimmed and “styled” to perfection like it stepped out of a tree salon. Plus, I wanted one a bit fuller.

So this year when I got an email from a family-run garden center that we like to support Glenwild Garden Center advertising “old-fashioned” Fraser firs that had not been trimmed to within an inch of their lives, I knew we had to check them out.

Saturday found us driving down Otter Hole Road (one of our favorite drives that takes us past several small lake communities) to Glenwild. They were having their Holiday Open House so the parking lot was full of cars and plenty of shoppers. We parked and headed to the cut trees. A young man that was working on the lot pointed us in the direction of the rack where the “old-fashioned” firs were. The first one I saw looked really good leaning on the rack and he pulled it out and stood it up for us. I could not believe my eyes. This tree was perfect! I walked all around it and not a bad side was too be found. Could it really be this easy? Was this my tree? I said YES immediately to this tree. He carried it off to slice off the bottom few branches and enough of the trunk to refresh it, bound it up in netting and even put it on top of the truck for us. I also found a beautiful wreath. Done and done!

Here it is before decorating. It hardly needs anything! I think it’s gorgeous!

Decorated updates to follow ...

P.S.
We put an ad on Craigslist for the big artificial tree saying it was “free” to any charity. A priest from a church near Paterson was the lucky recipient of our expensive foray into the world of fake trees.