About the only thing around here that’s in the Christmas Spirit is the weather. We’ve had some type of snow nearly every day since the weekend. An inch here, a flurry there, and showers scattered around. It’s really nice. But otherwise I couldn’t be less in the spirit of things this year. Usually I love Christmas, but this year it just doesn’t seem like it at all. I still think they should insert another month in-between Thanksgiving and Christmas to give us all time to adjust to the whole idea. I never think about Christmas until Thanksgiving is over with, and then it’s only three weeks away. I need more time!

When I was a child Christmas was a magical time. We would go shopping in downtown Poughkeepsie where all the store fronts were decorated gaily. We bought our Christmas tree. Mom would bake cookies and my sister and I would decorate them with different colored frostings. My Dad would roll out the fake plug-in fireplace and put it in the den where the tree stood in all its tinselly glory. We made trips at night in the car to drive by looking at Christmas lighting displays. Everything we did contributed to the whole feel of the season.

Then the big morning finally arrived and we were greeted with a tree piled high with presents. I think our parents totally spoiled us!

Hah, look at me in my baggy britches PJs! Who am I going to whack with that candy cane??

Here we are getting our Patty PlayPal dolls. She’s as big as I am!

I wish I could recapture some of that childhood magic. Maybe I don’t try hard enough. I should get out shopping, bake cookies, sing carols to the dogs, etc. This year there is still the pall of sadness over my Mom’s death hanging around. I still haven’t started to decorate the house. Our tree (which we got last weekend) is still standing in a bucket of water in the garage. We haven’t gotten around to putting lights up outside yet. This weekend, I keep telling myself, we must do all of that. To put it all up only to take it all back down and pack it up again in two weeks seems ridiculous somehow. Yet I know it will help us to “get in the spirit.”

To me it’s not about the presents but the whole feeling surrounding this time of year. Maybe I’m just a big kid that never grew up and I expect too much. It’s not something you can force. Either you feel it or you don’t.

The week before Christmas we have tickets to see the Rockettes in the Christmas Spectacular at Radio City Music Hall in NYC. I’m excited about that! We’ll roam around Rockefeller Center and see the big tree lit up, folks ice skating in the chilly air, and it will seem like something out of a Christmas movie. When I was a child my parents took me in on the train to see the Rockettes for my birthday a couple of times, but that was back in the days that they had a movie instead of stage show. I remember we saw “Father Goose” one year. Maybe by then I’ll be feeling more Christmas-y.