Christmas starts to be fun

I think I've figured out the trick: let all the organized people who take this whole Christmas thing very seriously get finished with their shopping early, then only the disorganized people not too bothered with tradition and consume and doing everything right are left over on the last few shopping days. I have been meeting a lot of friends in town in the past few days, and since none of us are expecting to be able to be efficient, we are all having a good time. I hope the mood has changed for the people in the shops as well, but that generally seems to be the case. Most of the people I have encountered seem to be quite relaxed and having a good time. I'm glad the shops are closed on Sunday too, so that people don't have to work until the last minute.

At the start of the month no one in my household seemed to feel much interest in Christmas. I had the impression the boys felt that a Christmas without cousins just isn't worth the effort. While Peter was in San Francisco, though, the boys and I went to pick out a Christmas tree to get it set up and decorated before Peter came home – to surprise him and to spare him the moving of furniture and the mess involved. Rather to our own surprise, we actually managed to agree on the tree we wanted relatively quickly, although it might not have been a great idea that the boys started out by admiring the biggest Christmas trees and thinking about how big the Christmas tree at Uncle Dan's house might be and which tree we might choose if we had a higher ceiling ... Within about twelve hours of having our tree up in the living room, I was rapidly coming to appreciate the advantages of having a small tree. Ours might be a small tree by Uncle Dan's standards, but it is certainly occupying a substantial portion of the living space in our European-sized living room. Nevertheless, we are quite pleased with it.



Getting it to stand up proved to be a bit more complicated than we had expected. First of all, the trunk was too thick to fit into our Christmas tree stand. Paddy and I tried whittling it down a bit with an ominous-looking hunting knife that I found in the tool drawer (I have no idea how this object came to reside in my household), but apart from making an impressive mess on the balcony, this wasn't very effective, so I started making phone calls. The next day our wonderful neighbor Richard came down with his son, our part-time adopted son Gerhard, and a whole collection of saws, and through our combined efforts we managed to carve the trunk down to the right size to fit into our Christmas tree stand. Unfortunately, the stand was too small to hold the tree upright then, which presented us with the choice of leaving Christopher and Gerhard to stand there holding it up until January or finding a possibility for acquiring – at least temporarily – a more substantial Christmas tree stand. Fortunately for us, Richard had a stand at home that worked for us, although this may mean that Gerhard is now left standing in the living room holding up the tree at home, since I'm not sure what else they might be using for their tree.



Reaching the point where the tree was actually standing securely, not in danger of toppling over and reasonably straight (depending on where you are standing in the room and/or whose opinion you ask) proved to be quite a production involving chopping off some branches and attempting to prop up the stand at the bottom with screw drivers, bits of wood, paper handkerchiefs, etc. Putting up a Christmas tree is clearly not a job for a highly skilled professional craftsman, which is why we had to get it finished before Peter came home. He would not have wanted to see this.

In the afternoon, while Christopher and I went to a Christmas party, Paddy did a brilliant job of cleaning up the mess, so we decorated the tree in the evening. Our Christmas tree decorations are hardly elegant, but every one has a story to go with it, so we told each other these stories as we put the things on the tree and shared memories of other Christmases. When we finished we just sat in the living room together sharing stories all evening. When the boys were little, they used to love to have me tell them "Grandpa stories", starting with stories I had heard about Dad and his brothers and progressing on to all kinds of family stories, some that were told to me as a child, some that I remember from my childhood. Christopher says that since they have meanwhile had respectively six and seven years of secondary education, we can call the stories "family anecdotes" now instead of "Grandpa stories". I think it doesn't matter what we call them, telling them is important, and I enjoyed the evening with the boys very much.



(Note on the pictures: Since the phone that Peter persuaded me to get in the summer has a camera function, I have started attempting to use it. I don't really see the point of a phone pretending to be a camera, and I don't find the results particularly convincing, but I'm working on it.)