It's beginning to look a BIT like Christmas

The beggars for alms are at the door, pale and thin and obviously undernourished ;-)

Our resident red squirrel. DH calls him Chatterer after Thornton Burgess' Red Squirrel. He is insatiable and VERY pugnacious!

Poor photo as it was taken through the sliding glass door. If I had opened it, he would have been inside in a heartbeat!

Anybody home? Anybody sympathetic? Anybody a REALLY soft touch?

Some Christmas alms have been dispensed . I wonder what we should call these disbursements at OTHER times of the year??

Then
There are the Christmas preparations inside the house.

This fellow was made ( by me ) many many Christmasses ago. He is standing up very well. DH wanted to know how soon he would deteriorate to compost! Not just yet, apparently.

I always find Christmas a time of joy tinged with melancholy. My Dad was the heart and soul of Christmas! He used to get us all wound up by about mid November by bringing the Christmas lights upstairs- the old kind, you know- those big frosted red, green,blue and yellow ones with the fuzzy braided cords. He would open the box and pull the strings out one at a time - maybe there was ONLY one cord- and , with great ceremony, plug it in to see which, if any bulbs needed replacing. He would start making decorations too, some out of clear, coloured cellophane drinking straws tied in a bunch and fanned out like a porcupine. He checked the boxes of balls and if any were broken, all shards were carefully collected . We cut a star shape from cardboard , smeared it with glue then Dad sprinkled his homemade glitter on made from the broken balls that he had carefully crushed down in the cellar. Dad was a fanatic decorator of trees . He placed EVERY SINGLE one of lead icicles on , one at a time! Dad LOVED Christmas. We loved Dad!

So, this Christmas, I feel like a failure. My Daddy would be appalled! I LOVE Christmas too but I am clearly getting old. When I brought our little tree upstairs to decorate, I wisely plugged it in before decorating, and found that half of the tree was not lit up! Frustrated, I yanked the lights off and tried to replace them with another string. NO GO! I went crazy trying to do that. The wires kept separating , bulbs kept going out and my temper just got the better of me - so... This year, we have a little tree with NO LIGHTS ON! I DID run a string of lights around underneath the tree on the skirt and it looks ok. However, now that it is all beautifully decorated, I DO miss the little lights on the tree:-(

I had my annual droop too. My Dad was born in November, 1919 and for his first Christmas , his Mum and Aunty( long, fascinating story) bought him a little cotton batten Santa for his first tree. After Mum moved from her own house and no longer had her own tree, she gave ME Daddy's little Santa for our tree. He is a sad little faded amputee, but I ADORE him and he hangs on our tree every year. And- every year, as soon as I see him and hang him up, I have a little weep . I miss my Dad! He died in 1965 so you would think maybe I would be past that but apparently not.

In closing, a couple of pictures of Christmas 2012 at our house and a wish that you all enjoy your own special preparations and memories. Happy Nine days before Christmas!

Daddy's Santa

This year's lightless tree

Happy preparation to all , and to all a good night! I am going to post this on needleandthreadnetwork.blogspot.com I KNOW it is not fibre art but... Please look at the rest of the posts at the top of the page. There is important info there for anyone using an iPad.

SORRY! I DID NOT GET THE LINK RIGHT SO PLEASE FORGIVE. SEE ABOVE RE: OLD AGE :-)