While Abby is a typical early-riser, and those genes don't come from Berta or me, neither of the kids have yet discovered the Christmas morning ritual of waking their parents at 5am with "Can we open our presents now?" Thankfully. No, I'm about to ruin my good fortune by saying we've been strangely lucky in our ability to sleep in until 9am or so before the kids stir. Still, there's a lot to do on Christmas day, and sometimes it seems more like work than a Holiday should bring.
We'll usually get up at say, 9am. I'm sure that as the kids get older, this will change and be earlier. We need to give a reasonable amount of time for Santa to place gifts under the tree, so we'll have to enforce some limit on the time before we can go downstairs.
Berta's sister, Mary Ann, and her husband, Ryan, visited over the weekend. With them, we went to select our Christmas tree.
What bothers me about this year, and last year, is that we've been trying to go out for a "cut your own tree" experience. I mean, what's the point of going out to get a tree form a tree farm if you aren't cutting down your own tree? You might as well buy a tree from one of the stands on the side of the road.
There is no Christmas shopping done. I think we've just about given up this year. My only enthusiasm for this holiday so far is for it to be over. Of the bazillion lights we bought last year to put outside, we've hung exactly zero.
I think we blew through our Christmas enthusiasm on the weekend after Thanksgiving when we went tree shopping, couldn't find the usual place, and ended up with a decent but pre-cut tree. I wasn't home when Berta and the kids decorated both trees this year. The one in the family room still isn't done being decorated, I think. And thinking about it now, I wonder if I'm going to have the stamina for two trees worth of holiday.
I used to live near a paper mill. Several of them. Some of my family worked there, including my grandfather and my uncle Joe (my grandmother's sister's husband). Both my grandfather and Uncle Joe were in the Navy, and they plied their skills at tying knots to their new trade in the private sector.
Perhaps it is not widely imagined how paper is processed by a mill. Actually, all of the paper mills in Downingtown are recycled paper plants. They don't use cut trees to make paper, just old paper and cardboard. The paper is put into a big vat of chemicals to help break it down and re-form it into pulp, then it's pressed out through some machinery to be flattened and dried. The resulting paper can be any thickness, and can be used to construct many things, like boxes for board games, french fry containers, or inch-thick concrete pillar molds.
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