by jimw1949 » Sun Dec 15, 2013 9:20 pm
There are a lot of things the wife and I used to do for the Christmas season, but now that the two daughters are grown up and are on their own we have cut back on a lot of stuff. For example, we used to do a lot of baking at Christmas time, lots of cookies and other assorted goodies. Some of it was for us, but we gave a whole bunch of it away to friends and to "shut-ins" around town. It was lot of fun and the house sure smelled good with all the baking going on. We even made fudge a few times, although that wasn't our best thing. For some reason only about 1/3 of the batches of fudge we made turned out really good. There must be a trick to making it and apparently we didn't know what the trick was.
We would have one evening when all of us would put up our "fake" full size Christmas tree and decorate it. We would put presents under the tree and the daughters would shake the boxes to see if they could guess what was in them. We would have several strings of lights outside and another bunch of lights for inside. We would have some of the lights around the inside of the windows so they could be seen from the outside too, and we would put one of those battery powered candles to put in the middle of each window. On Christmas Eve we would have a steak dinner and then we would attend the midnight church service. That was always a lot of fun and we looked forward to it every year. Now that the daughters are grown up and on their own, we don't seem to have much of the enthusiasm we once had. Part of it is because we are older, part of it is because the kids are grown, and I guess part of it is because we just don't feel like doing all the work involved.