Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, or just a good day off to all of you and yours!
The picture above is of our Christmas tree this year. Just about everything on it, from the star at the top to the tiniest ornament has a story behind it. There are pictures of pets, some long deceased, ornaments made by friends or children or children of friends, and ornaments that once hung on our parents’ Christmas trees or decorated our earliest Christmas presents. Each a story. Each a memory.
You may notice that we placed no ornaments on the lower few feet of the tree. Kara is an adolescent—she turned one year old a few days ago—and we believe in “lead us not into temptation”.
If you look behind and to the right of the tree, you’ll see a few pieces from my glass collection. That’s something I haven’t mentioned here in a long time. I have a number of collections and the pieces you see are from my collection of pre-Civil War American pressed glass. That’s just one of my collections. The perils of being a recovering antique dealer and a third generation collector of antiques.
Beneath the tree are the Christmas presents we gave to each other this year.
This year it’s a very consumable Christmas at the Schuler house. My wife gave me six pounds of honey, avocado honey and eucalyptus honey from an apiary in Ventura County. I gave her two bottles of whiskey, distilled at a local distillery. Several relatives sent us nuts. I wonder if they’re trying to tell us something?
My wife also game me a DVD copy of a wonderful old Barbara Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray picture, Remember the Night, a movie with a Christmas theme, a shirt from LL Bean, and a new bedside clock radio. I gave her a salad plate from the 70 year old set of dishes we use as our everyday dishes.
I got a tactical assault knife & a box set of Godzilla movies – woo hoo!
(No idea WTF I’m supposed to do with the knife. Now that the scumbag neighbors are gone I don’t need to assault anything, with or without over a foot of steel.)
Really wasn’t expecting anything, though, and didn’t really want anything other than my traditional Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup stocking stuffers. Last year I bought myself some industrial strength shelves for the garage room, and did so early, but these days I just want my daughter to have a good time of it.
Anyhow, Merry Christmas folks. I hope your Christmas dinner was as tasty as ours.
For Christmas dinner we had something rather humble. I concocted a sort of gratin of cauliflower, ham, onions, and cheese which we ate with a salad of baby spinach, oranges, and slices of red onion.