Fa, la, la, la, la.....

Deck the Halls is one my LEAST favorite Christmas carols.  It always seemed rather pointless to me,  "Don we now our gay apparalll"  ok, whatever.   Of course, my Mom loved all things Christmas.  To a dyed-in-the-wool decorating freak like herself, Christmas was the Holy Grail, Nirvana and all those other rolled into one.  Imagine it, a holiday that literally expects you to move furniture and nic-nacs out of your house, pack them away, to put up other decorations and nic-nacs, so you can look at them for a just a month, then do it again.   Don't get me wrong, I'm right there with the rest of the lemmings doing it as early as everyone else.  I don't live in a very large house, so I don't have room to go Ikea crazy with the decorations.   But I do like a nice tree and a few other decorations.  This year I put up one of my Mom's last purchases in the decoration arena.  She had this several piece porcelain nativity that I took home with me.  It's very lovely, but would look lovelier in the middle of my 4000 square foot home.  So, I don't have one of those, I still put it up. 

I also put up a fiber-optic snowman outside, one that was still in the box, never used by her.  It made my dad happy that I have it up.  I am going up to his house Friday evening to decorate his tree and make his house festive.  It makes him happy to have things like my Mom might have had them, so I comply. 

Friends have been asking me how I'm doing this Christmas.  To be honest, I'm doing rather well.  Yes, I miss my Mom, yes I wish she was here, healthy and bugging me about helping her put up countless lights and tinsel on her tree.   I know my Dad wishes she was here, healthy or not, but I don't wish her here the way she was at the end.  My Mom is much happier where she is, despite the fact that I wish she was here.  

So here I am, my second Christmas without my mom.  So far, so good.