More Christmas Memories


 The picture is just for attention; it's of the sunrise just outside of our back door.  But the cedar trees remind me of the evergreens we had back in California.  We had so many trees on our property, but there were only maybe a handful of deciduous  trees; mostly alder.  The bulk of the trees there are Douglas Fir and that what we used as our Christmas tree.  Though, as I have written about on here several years ago, we didn't use trees from our own property.  My dad would take us up into the mountains there to get our Christmas tree.  We had to get a permit from the Forest Service to cut a tree, of course, but we never saw any forest service official or anything out there monitoring it.  We would often find perfectly good trees that had been cut and then abandoned for a supposedly better tree.  We would take those home, too, sometimes.  We'd "plant" them outside in front of the house.  

I remember we would decorate the tree with all of my mom's old ornaments, the glass ones with those little indentations in them.  We also had tinsel.  Back in the day, in the 70s and earlier I would imagine, tinsel was everything when decorating the Christmas tree.  Mom had the old fashioned kind made of lead.  I remember putting it on the tree strand by strand.  It would be old and would often break into smaller strings.  At the end of the season when we'd take the tree down, no matter how careful we were picking the tinsel off of the tree, strand by strand, some of it would inevitably get lost, or stay stuck in the tree. 

Mom also had a few of those little vintage elves that she had collected from bottles of Joy dishwashing detergent.  They were given out on the bottles in the 1960s when you purchased them I believe.  I still have two of them.  I wish they were in better condition, but they are treasures.  It is incredible to believe that they are going on 60 years old!  I don't have a picture of them at this very moment, but I will try to post them tomorrow.


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