Sunday, December 22, 2013

Our First Christmas

This was to be our Christmas tree decorating and apple pie fest day, but my cold caused a cancellation. Mustering what energy I could, we decided we'd decorate the tree anyway.

Rick went along with my desire to have a real tree. Christmas trees are symbolic of the winter solstice, the turning back to the sun, a new year with new growth. Plastic doesn't cut it unless I want to appeal to a plastic sun.

Rick laid out the ornaments watched by our "animals".


Each Christmas trees carries the memories of every other tree. There is no golden cage with a pink bird from my childhood, a 1957 sputnik from my Wigglesworth years, but there were the ornaments that Llara and we painted when she was three. Rick kept saying "Here's a Santa," "Here's a sleigh," Here's a drum."

He put everything on time lapse video as a memory of our first  Christmas tree.


I've always thought each tree contains all the trees of Christmas past. So we don't have the bird in the golden cage from my childhood, sputnik from my Wigglesworth years, or even some of the ornaments that Llara and I painted when she was so little that staying in the lines just didn't happen and didn't matter at all. I love each ornament. I gave some of them to her a way back for her own tree keeping some for myself. There is no one singing the "bum de bum bum" of the "Little Drummer Boy."  At the same time there are brownies to eat made by the same hands that made them in Geneva when other trees were decorated. These new brownies were carried lovingly on the train ride south.

Rick admires the tree in process.


Now to get the presents wrapped and Christmas dinner bought. I only wish some special people were with us in reality and not just in our hearts.

Rick's version complete with time lapse video is http://lovinglifeineurope.blogspot.fr/2013/12/needles-and-pines.html







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