Shoelaces for Josie

But I’m going to give ‘er a good ole jolly go, and today? The seven things Christmas means to me. The seven things I always remember around Christmas. The seven things that will likely be with me until the day I step both feet into my grave. They’re in no particular order. Well kind of. But not really. Only just a little.

7. Old ladies singing Christmas hymns in their wobbly, old-lady voices. Off-key. Loudly. And out of rhythm. They can’t hold “Gloooooooooria” near as well as they used to. We all know it. The neighboring communities in a three county radius know it. It’s just that – well – no one has ever told them that.

6. Over the hills and through the woods…Grandma’s house! My grandparents lived in a red house with white shutters on a dead-end road. They had a horseshoe drive, a wood-burning furnace and a pair of great couches that you could sink into and never come out of. Actually, that’s just because they were really old. I think they still have them. If Grandpa hadn’t been a rancher, he would have made a really great banker.

5. Lights. Sometimes, if we were really lucky, we would get to drive around our town at night and look at all the Christmas lights. I dearly loved that. Our little town did a bang-up job on Christmas lights. So much so that they held bus tours, and the out-of-towners would all come in and see the sights. Last Thanksgiving, my trip to an obscure little Montana town was highlighted by the fact that the town didn’t use street lamps to illuminate the walkways…just Christmas lights. I guess I still dearly love them.

4. Pouring cows. Moving cows. Chasing cows. Dad had six kids for a reason. Slave labor! Christmas break was always spent with the cattle. Sometimes even on the holidays, we’d be working cows. I can still remember freezing my toes off in the icy blast of an Iowa winter wind. Those were the days when we’d throw a corral up, pen off six or eight, pour them, shuttle them back out to the pasture and run in six or eight more. Wait…I just realized why I’m short. I was frozen as a child! The cold stunted my growth!

3. Turkey. Ham. Duck. Rabbit. One year we even had goose, I think. But never beef. We ate beef 363 days of the year. Christmas dinner was for something special. Mashed potatoes and homemade noodles and mom’s red, white and green Christmas salad. It was Jell-O with whipped cream, but man did it look cool. Rolls, sweet potatoes (It wasn’t until I moved to Washington that I discovered sweet potatoes actually could be good.) and stuffing. Ooo, and pie. I love pie. Pie is my favorite. If I could – well, no – I wouldn’t marry pie, but I bet I’d date it for eight years.

2. It’s A Wonderful Life. So it’s from the 1940s. So there’s some ridiculous movie called Elf that gets played on the television all the time. So Jimmy Stewart isn’t supposed to be a favorite actor of someone my age. Well he is. And I don’t like the movie Elf. And the Frisbee was invented in the 1940s. It was a very legitimate decade. There’s just something about George Bailey telling old man Potter off that makes me happy. “You sit around here and you spin your little webs and you think the whole world revolves around you and your money. Well, it doesn’t, Mr. Potter. In the whole vast configuration of things, I’d say you were nothing but a scurvy little spider.”