The Christmas Walk must be over; a cat just upchucked on the carpet.
They’ve been ticked off for two week-ends now at being shut down in the basement. The saying is that “revenge is sweet” but that’s not quite how I’d describe this ( I’ll spare you how I would describe it.).
All-in-all, that’s pretty small potatoes compared to what could have gone wrong at any number of places (The quilt-rack falling down doesn’t count, since I didn’t see it happen…or even hear of it until long after). Nobody slipped and fell, nobody wandered down and toppled into the creek with the beavers, nobody made off with any of the silver( Nobody definitively figured out what the big spoon was in the place setting either. There were several good guesses, however.) Most of the time I remembered to plug and unplug lights at the appointed times (I could stand to skip my electric bill this month; it’s sure to be astronomical). A couple of nights the candle set up in the attic window had shone long after the closing bell but there were no complaints that I know of.
Got to try a new recipe or two, one for distribution to the walkers-through and one for the small party on Sunday night : Imperial Cereal ( Picked up from a mystery series by Joanne Fluke; none of the mysteries involved poisoning) and one from the AB-J food section ( How could I not try something named “Cranberry Jezebel”? Combines cranberry, mustard and horseradish–that’ll set your sinuses free!). Nobody…so far…has suffered any ill effects from chowing down on those and we even gave out copies of the munchie cereal one to several aficionados who went through. The chocolate items went pretty fast too but I think that MacKenzie Bray was pushing those when she was at the counter–an eleven-year old can be very persuasive. She almost convinced me to let her have the latest kitten that’s in the garage but I have the feeling that her mother and dad would hunt me down for pulling a stunt like that.
One of the things that pleased me most about the entire project was the fact that so much of the work was done by local people–former students, even! Porter Construction, Goodnight’s Kitchen & Bath, Scotchman Electric, Silver Creek Plumbing, Terry McCone on the gutters, Rob Maur Excavating, Bret Pesicek on the concrete work, Bob Lavery’s Nature’s Carpet for the remarkable landscaping, Silver Frog Studios for framing, Jim Knowlton for the addition plans, probably more that I cannot remember. Good people, good work can be found at home if you look around you.
And for the actual DECORATING–the above was construction stuff–Good Grief! The borrowing going on was simply amazing. The Pelfreys will be sitting around a whispy little pine branch with four glass ornaments, used tinsel, and a Ray-O-Vac keychain light because so much of their stuff is over here. Art-N-Flowers did all of the wreaths, swags, roping and arrangements that graced the mansion–made it smell pretty good too (That’s above and beyond the cats, of course.). The Vancura Gallery of Fine Art and Framing still has an eye-catcher or two…maybe three… on display at their establishment but the ones here definitely made an impression( I liked the one of Shakespeare’s characters called “All the World’s a Stage”; you could see Julius Caesar with daggers in his back and Cleopatra with her asp–nothing like a great asp to make a picture!).Their Santa picture by Christianson was perfect, even matched the color scheme.
I had a fine time! Except for the time out to eat breakfast on the first Saturday (I skipped it on the second one so we could go directly to the uber-tasty Methodist lunch) and the time out to tour the whole shebang with my mother and sisters and niece, I got to talk to just about every one who came through–same old stories, new listeners–over the course of the whole seven days. Every Friday and Saturday morning, Sunday afternoon somebody would show up at my door and proceed to straighten up and plug in and get things going. What’s not to like? Some of the volunteers got so good that I expected them to start telling stories from my childhood that even I don’t remember. My favorite was the Thursday evening candlelight tour when the outside lights were more featured; harder to see dirt then too.
The Grand Pooh-Bah of decorating, may have to take to his bed with a monstrous case of the vapors–that and a new job– from the over-exertion of putting this all together but it’s dollars to doughnuts that some type of festivity (not counting the Twentieth Century Club Christmas party) will be scheduled here during the holiday season. Bring It On, I say. In for a penny, in for a pound. Sooner be shot for a sheep as a lamb. *————*————–* (Your saying here)
Thanks, everyone.
Joyeux Noel!
