It's Christmas!

My life as a child really had it's ups and downs. Christmas was the one day of the year that was good, a definite 'up'. Every year my mother would sew a new outfit for each doll that my sisters and I had. There were always cookies and decorations. I can still recall the smell of a pine tree just brought into the house. Part of the fun was figuring out how to make a tree stand up straight when it was sitting in an old tar bucket. We didn't have a proper tree stand until the mid-60's. Then it became my job to lie on the floor under the tree adjusting the screws in the stand to get the tree straight.

My son was born just before Christmas, the best present I have ever received. I have a picture from that year with 'S' sitting under the tree just like a present. The year that he turned 3, he wanted to decorate the tree all by himself. Luckily it was only a 3 foot artificial tree. He kept putting all of the ornaments on one side and did not want me repositioning them. When the tree finally tipped over, he looked at it as if the tree should have known better than to fall.

I grew up in Ohio, so there was snow every winter. I enjoyed the snow as a child. It was only when I had to drive to school or work in it that I developed a real dislike for it. The town where I grew up is in the Ohio River valley, so we had some really steep hills. Sledding was the winter sport. Traffic on 14th Street would yield to the sleds. We would rub wax on the sled runners to make them go faster. It's a wonder that kids lived through sledding season. I had a bad headache after I hit my cousin in the legs when she wandered into the path of my sled. I guess it was good luck for her that I hit her with my head rather than the front of the sled. My brother broke his arm trying to stop his sled from going under a parked car. There were broken bones, sprains, scrapes, bruises and cold fingers, but it was all worth it for that excitement. It was really neat at night when little bare patches in the snow would cause the runners to spark on the pavement, like fireflies on a winter night.