To my blog friends, I give you the last few lines from my Christmas newsletter:

Dearly Beloved has been outside decorating. “I’ve finished; come and see!”

It’s absolutely Griswald-esque. . . our half-lit maple tree.

Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, wherever you may be

Think of us this holiday . . .your friends,

the Half-Lit Lees.

One year our son sold his house and stored most of his things until he found another place he liked.  During that period, almost every time we saw him, he had on Birkenstocks–one black, one brown.  He said that he had a similar pair in storage.

Remember the unmatched socks in Harry Potter stories?   I think I should start knitting!

The little shaver came up with some holiday style of his own.   His brother has a pair just like them, in reverse.

Not much time for blogging this week.  Daughter Pogo and her family arrived last night.  The three little shavers keep everything lively around here.

Here’s one of them:

That’s the routine every morning with Dearly Beloved.    They brush, they floss, they shave, they groom. . .  along with Granddad, the pied piper of personal hygiene.

Today, even the eyebrows were lucky to come out unscathed.

Raindrops on roses. . . but whiskers on noses?

When he was younger, our son, good egg that he is, sometimes made Christmas gifts for me.   I treasure them all, but these are perhaps my favorites.

Meet the Ovas–Mom, Dad, and little Bud, made from blown-out egg shells.

They’re in good shape except for missing a few limbs, which can be replaced.   That’s pretty surprising, since I’ve had them for at least 15 years.  They are packed away in the attic each year with the rest of the decorations and have been moved at least four times.   Amazingly, they remain uncracked.

We should all be so lucky!

Earlier this week I retold the story of the cat and the green ribbon .  This morning I can report that our Christmas with the Animals tradition seems to be alive and well.  Dearly Beloved just returned from walking Miss Piggy and informed me that SHE’s now pooping artificial red berries.   Apparently she munched while I had the Christmas stuff laid out a couple of nights ago.

I’m behind–as usual–and I’ll take any Christmas decorations wherever I can find ‘em.  Just not there.

Finally.. . a sunny day here!  We’ve been postponing doing any outside decorating because of (a) the Creeping Crud which still keeps us awake at night coughing and blowing our noses and (b) it’s been cloudy, foggy, drizzly for days.  Tomorrow is supposed to be a sleet/snow mixture, so we need to get the outside lights and decorations up today.   I don’t want to be accused of having crappy Christmas decorations.  Literally.

Dearly Beloved goes in two extremes in his Christmas decorating ideas.   He either puts out a spotlight to shine on the ten-year-old Christmas wreath I usually slap on the front door and calls it “simplicity” or gets out the colored lights and goes for “beer joint cool.”  He needs supervision.

No time to linger on the computer, so, just like the networks, I’m tossing out another rerun from 2008 this morning.  If you need a good horseradish sauce recipe, try the one I included in this post.

Today I read one of my favorite blogs, The Kitchen Witch, and found myself strangely comforted to read about her experiences as Cat Lady.  Her cats sounded more obnoxious than ours!  Since misery does love company, here is a retelling of an earlier post about Mittens and the green ribbon saga:

Our oldest daughter, Boo, was never fully convinced she was ours.  Heck, we wondered, too.  Perhaps a switch in the hospital nursery wherein her birth mother sneaked back in and left her behind in trade for a baby that actually slept?

Delicious irony of ironies, when she married and had children, her baby boys made her own infant sleeping patterns look narcoleptic.   Ah, sweet Karma.

During her teenage years,  Boo, more than either of our other children, believed she was saddled with the uncoolest family in town.  She was just entering high school when we moved from North Carolina to Wisconsin and indeed, we were “different.”

Those sausage-y things on buns so popular up there?  We learned that “brats” rhymes with “pots” and not “rats.”

Wisconsin folks went “up north” for vacations; we headed south to see all the relatives, loading the luggage in the Sears Turtle carrier on top of the station wagon.  We plugged a portable TV into the cigarette lighter and strung it over the seats so the kids lie back and watch TV between old radio tapes of  The Shadow and Our Miss Brooks.  We did look a little… um…Clampett-esque.  Still, all of us now think of those as happy years… our own version of Little House on the Prairie.

During those years, I was into the Mother Earth stuff.  Handmade items saved money on gifts.  My best efforts were felt mice ornaments made from patterns I’d saved from magazines:  a night-capped mouse sleeping in a little hammock hanging between two Christmas tree branches, a robed church mouse holding a hymnal, and a baby mouse peeking out of a tiny embroidered Christmas stocking.   City mice!

They took inordinate amounts of time to make, but almost nothing in supplies, so the craft basket that sat beside my chair held some fabric scraps, a few felt squares in mousey and Christmas colors, and a few yards of quarter-inch of  red or green ribbon.  It was all handwork, so I’d work on them evenings.  They were easy to package and mail since they were non-breakable and lightweight.

One year my ornament construction was cut short because my green ribbon supply disappeared and there were no substitutes to be had in that small Wisconsin town.  Anything Christmasy sold fast there.  With a foot or so of snow on the ground, folks hung their Christmas decorations early and dragged their feet about taking them down.   (I’m not being critical;  who would want to be out in sub-zero weather,  pulling light strings off frozen shrubbery?!)

Christmas Eve morning I rose early to bake cinnamon rolls.  Mittens, a most obnoxious cat, padded down the stairs after me.  That was unusual; he usually ignored me except to sneak up on me when I was standing at the sink or range and bite me sharply on the heel right at my Achilles tendon.  Although I had rescued the ungrateful feline from traffic, I’m convinced he never forgave me for having him neutered.

When he followed me into the kitchen that Christmas Eve morning,  I noticed something trailing behind him.  I thought he had something stuck to his foot, but on closer examination, saw it was coming from him…trailing from behind…HIS behind.  I screamed for Dearly Beloved.

Mittens is losing his intestines!

Before DB could get near enough to check, the cat ran to the back of the house (litter box territory) dragging his kite tail behind him.  When he reappeared and ran under the dining room table,  it looked as if he had an even longer train of. . . whatever.  To be grossly graphic, it had bumps along it,  little brown pompoms.

I was frantic, but completely at a loss as to what to do to help him.  The vet’s office was closed.

Should I try to stuff it back in?

Cut it off and try to staunch any bleeding?

Was he dying?

Then, as I crawled on all fours, trying to pull him from beneath the table,  I saw a flash of green along the “hanging chads.”  My Christmas ribbon!  This was The Passing of the Green.

It was alarming, but at the same time,  so ridiculous it was funny, especially considering what I’d thought was happening.  When you think your cat is losing his guts, realizing he’s crapping a green streak is much less alarming.

While two of our children worried for the cat, the third–Boo, our sophisticated high schooler–stood at the top of the stairs of this House of Horrors and shrieked between retching sounds.

(URP!) Things like this don’t HAPPEN to other families…!  (URP!)  I KNOW I was switched at birth!  Even our  (URP!) cat is gross!!  I know I must belong to a NORMAL family out there somewhere!  (BLEH, URP!)

Everything came out fine.  I mean that literally.  Boo’s stomach and temper settled, the cinnamon rolls rose, and the cat seasonally decorated his litter box in festive green for the next several days.   The ribbon which could have caused serious injury, I suppose,  passed through–all four feet or so of it.

During her college years, and even today, whenever any of us mail a Christmas package to Boo and her family, we don’t have to put a nametag on hers.  She knows; it’s the one tied with the green ribbon.

Miss Piggy and I just returned from a soggy walk around the neighborhood.  She of the dainty paws didn’t want to go, but it was a necessary trip.  “Something in the air,” if you get the drift.  Hers, I mean.

We need a little Christmas around here.  Our street doesn’t seem as festive as some others in the neighborhood, so I need to do my part to remedy that.  I’ll e-mail the neighbors and ask them to ramp it up a notch.

Here at the Lee house, “behind” is the watchword of the day.  For starters, we’re still on ours–snoozing on our respective sofas–coughing and hacking, although I have been out a few times on quick errands.

“The Creeping Crud” is not the only reason I’m behind.  Since I always make–and break–some kind of self-improvement resolutions, this year I decided to start early.  The sands of time aren’t just shifting; they’re blowing into my eyes, settling in my rear end, sandbagging my bosom, and leaving tracks on my face.

A couple of weeks ago I ordered a lighted makeup mirror with enough magnification to allow me to see the freckles on a flea.  Whoa!  For the  first few days it was a full-time job just de-foresting my nostrils and chin. Not only that, but my skin is so dry that the magnifying mirror showed little bits of dried skin here and there.

Snow may be in, but flaky is not a good look or state of mind at any time,  so a trip to the cosmetic counters was in order.  The cosmetic companies may want to put out bids.

Thursday morning, one of the department stores opened earlier than the rest of the mall, so that seemed the ideal time to go.  I could hit the cosmetic counters without an audience.  (WHY do they put them in the middle of the store?)  Because of the hour I found a great parking place.

Inside, it didn’t look that holiday-ish.  Looks like the mall cut back on decorations this year.

I knew that senior citizens (yeah, I wrote that with a straight face) walk the malls in the morning, but I was surprised to see all the young moms with strollers.  About a dozen women had their strollers lined up in front of a closed store so the babies could watch the mommies do aerobics. Awwww!   Another large group of moms was walking double-file, pushing strollers large enough for the kid to have a sleepover inside.  In prime shopping traffic, they would constitute a nightmare.  At 9 AM, they were cute.

The cosmetic idea went south quickly.  Whoever made the executive decision to let the “we’re so hip!” makeup line–whatever it was– play loud, jarring music at their counter apparently missed school the day of the SOUND TRAVELS lesson.  The very HIPPY among us who might have visited Laura Mercier or Estee Lauder without the noise decided it would be less of a headache to visit Walgreen’s  later. Maybe it’s not so obnoxious during the peak hours, but in a quiet store…yikes!

Shopping is complicated for me.  I get some weird notions in my head and end up sabotaging myself.  For instance, I am desperately in need of a new handbag. Here are my criteria for selection:

• can’t cost a fortune.  I may not want to be buried with it.
• mustn’t weigh a ton so I can actually carry stuff in it without rotator cuff injury.
• must have a good but not complicated closure so that if it falls between the seats in the movie theater, everything doesn’t fall out and roll down to the front.
• shouldn’t be a walking billboard for the designer unless they pay me to carry it.
• can’t be a Calvin Klein or Jessica Simpson because I haven’t forgiven him for his old kiddy porn underwear ad series.  Jessica Simpson?   We are talking Daisy Duke here, aren’t we?

Notice that I have already assigned myself an impossible task and I haven’t even mentioned style, size, or color.

On to Ready-to-Wear because my wardrobe hit bedraggled several seasons ago and every time I go out, DB begs me to buy something for myself.

Once again, I came up empty.   Scratch everything sleeveless, see-through, spandex, butt-high, or Dry Clean Only and I’m left standing by the clearance rack of flannel nightgowns in the lingerie department.

I didn’t buy a darned thing except for a cup of peppermint mocha which smelled divine.  I left just as the parking lot was reaching saturation.  Valet parking is $5, so it hardly seemed worth it to try to sell my parking space for $4.50.    Drivers were getting surly and one almost hit me as I walked to my car.  Once he realized I was parked in the Promised Land he almost rammed the car behind him, trying to back up to snag my space.

I didn’t move until he drove on in disgust.  I left my space to the civilized human being behind him.

Merry parking space, Lady.  Watch out for the strollers.

The signs went up last week.  Homeowners Associations sent out e-mail notices, the Traffic Department made robo-calls, the newspaper printed maps, warning motorists.

Not just a road race, but the Charlotte marathon.  They call it (groan) Thunder Road.

The race begins and ends uptown, but comes through our neighborhood.   The 10-mile mark was at our corner.  When the runners reached that point they had been traveling uphill for blocks and blocks.

It was cloudy, damp, and cold–in the 20’s.  The leaders had passed.  This is part of the thundering herd.

Neighbors stood around in warm jackets, drinking coffee and applauding.  This attractive young woman from the running club called out encouragement to the runners.  

I think I used to have a butt like that.

DEARLY BELOVED!  When is the last time we saw that thing–the 70’s?

As the grandsons might say, “Bummer!”

There were cowbells and jingle bells and Santa hats.  

(To paraphrase the comic strip BC today,  I did not mean to include the Golden Retriever contributing to the Gross Domestic Product.  I hope the owner had a bag.  There were more witnesses than she anticipated.)

There is always one of these guys.  BRRRRRRRR!!

I mean, COME ON!, Guy!  Even the dog was wearing a sweater!

The dog wasn’t in the race, incidentally.  He, like the Golden Retriever, was out to contribute to the Gross Domestic Product.

All of these drivers forgot about the traffic warnings.  It always happens.  Tomorrow there will be angry letters in the newspaper from motorists who had to wait for 9,000 runners to pass.

Most of the neighborhood enjoys it.  There were signs, lawn chairs, cheering friends and family along the route.

We came back inside, poured another cup of coffee, and looked out  the back window occasionally.

Just like the Energizer bunnies.

Still running. . . !

Gather around…it’s time for Merrilymarylee’s Christmas craft time.   Surprising, because nope, I’m not crafty.  A little sneaky from time to time, but not crafty.

My acrylic paints are older than some of the grandsons, but if I can shake up a little color when I add water in the dried-up bottles, they’re good for another year.

I used to use a Dremel, but it lost its appeal after I discovered that the Apple Dumpling Gang contractor was using my drill to grind down his false teeth while he was here working on our kitchen.

By this point, any true crafters have moved on.  The rest of you, come and sit by me.

A couple of years ago I was walking along the beach and  scooped up a handful of these:

They’re mussel and oyster shells, I think.  Half shells, some just bits of them. They’re common on our beach, but not exactly a shell collector’s dream.  After I studied them awhile,  some began to remind me of hair or a beard.

I thought I’d try to turn them into Santa gift tags.

I don’t spend much time working on them–no Gesso or primer.  They’re only gift tags, after all.  I drilled a hole in some with my Dremel, but found that gluing the ribbon to the back of the shell usually holds.

I found that the mussel shells are more apt to look like Santa.  Some of the oyster shells looked more solemn.   One that started out to be Santa ended up as an angel.  Another looked more like a seated  lady. Not for a minute am I claiming to have seen the Virgin Mary in an oyster shell, thank you.  I painted the shell to be what it looked like it wanted to be.

Here are a few of my Santa shell gift tags, along with the angel and woman.  So far, no wise men on the beach.

I’m still a long way away from having to figure out how to display a creche on the half shell.

The beach folks were beginning to decorate for Christmas the last time we were there.

City decorations would look strange there.  Even their parade is different, since the floats are REALLY floating.  It is held at night so that the boat lights will show.  Watching a flotilla can be achilla!  (groan!)

Some of the residents were decorating their homes.  No, this definitely isn’t ours!  (May as well unpack your suitcase.)

The town chose lights appropriate for a beach area.

.

I took those pictures on my way to watch the sun rise one morning just before 6 AM.

Some summer wildflowers still bloom and the planted pansies wave brightly in their beds, but it’s nice to see some plants with red berries, like hollies and pyracantha.

Pyracantha shrub

SEAsons GREETINGS!