He's loaded lots of toys and goodies on his sleigh

Back in the early 1970s, my step-mom was into crafts and made a number of tree ornaments, including this wreath. I have a small number of her ornaments, as I'm sure my other siblings do. One of them (an ornament, not a sibling), a snowflake made from rolled strips of paper, has since disintegrated. I think the glue that held it all together got too old. It was my favorite, and I still have pieces of it, but it can no longer hang on the tree.

Crafty. I can see it's beginning to fray around the edges.

It looks like the wreath might have been made from a doily (or something like that). If I remember, she gave these ornaments to me in the years after I left home so I'd have something to hang on my little Charlie Brown-style Christmas trees. It blows my mind that they are about fifty years old. Yikes!

They know that Santa's on his way

Many of the tree ornaments in our "collection" evoke nature, animals, and/or food. I really like this little bird feeder. That's real birdseed inside! I don't know, but the bird might just be the bluebird of happiness.

Remember incandescent mini twinkle lights? They're long gone, replaced by LEDs.

I think that this one came from Crate & Barrel in San Francisco's Union Square neighborhood, close to where I once worked. I read on line that the store closed last year, which is too bad. I enjoyed wandering around inside during lunch hour back in the day. But there are several other C&B stores around the Bay Area that should take up the slack, not to mention on line shopping.

Will find it hard to sleep tonight

Another day, another favorite ornament. This one I found at a place called Restoration Hardware in the SF Bay Area. I looked up the store on line and it looks like it has gone seriously upscale from twenty or so years ago when I used to shop there.

I can row a boat, canoe?

At any rate, this little canoe reminds me of camping trips in the Adirondack Mountains of upstate New York when I was a kid. My dad liked to rent a canoe or other small boat and take it out on a lake at the crack of dawn to fish. He would, of course, drag me along (he also dragged me to a golf course a time or two to caddy for him. Yawn.) I had no interest in fishing whatsoever; no patience for it at all. But I must admit, paddling out onto a mirror-calm mountain lake as the sun rose and burned off the misty morning ground fog was quite pretty.

Tiny tots with their eyes all aglow

If you've followed this blog for a while, you probably know I'm a tennis fan. So it follows that I'd have a tennis ball tree ornament. I first picked up a tennis racquet back in the early seventies, the age of Evert, Connors, and Navratilova, among others. I was never very good at it.

The smaller-than-life-size tennis ball ornament.

In the late eighties, I took a tennis class at the local community college in San Francisco, but I didn't get much better. The last time I picked up a racquet was 2003, just before we moved to France. I did, however, become pretty good at watching tennis on tv and, these days, many more tournaments are televised than there used to be.

Help to make the season bright

Ken's aunt painted oyster shell Santas back in the day, several of which adorn our tree each year. At least since the '90s. She also painted on canvas, and we have one of her Outer Banks beach scenes hanging in our entry.

A smiling oyster shell santa painted by Ken's aunt.

We're in a warming trend right now. Today's high is expected to hit 14ºC (about 57ºF) later today and tomorrow. That's pretty mild. I haven't built a fire in a couple of days.

I did venture out to the market in the wind and rain yesterday morning. I figured that, in that weather, there wouldn't be any lines for ordering the holiday bird. I was right. And the fish monger had coques (cockles), so I got a kilo of those. We'll use them to make linguini with white clam sauce for today's lunch.

Everybody knows, a turkey and some mistletoe

As the years go by, my memory goes with them. I can't really remember the details about this ornament. It was likely a gift and I know who the likely gift-giver is. I just can't remember if those memories are correct. The ornament is a figure of a wolf and I think it came from a gift shop in Yosemite National Park. Did it come from my friend, S.? Did I buy it myself? Doubts creep in like a San Francisco fog.

The wolf kind of reminds me of our former sheltie, Collette (1992-2006).

That's one of the great things about having done this blog for the past eighteen years. I now have many memories recorded, some in photographs, others in prose. A lot of the details from before that time, however, are kind of up for grabs. The big events are easy to remember. My first trip to Paris. Meeting Ken. Finishing my college education. Buying our first house. Things like that. The rest, well, the devil's in the details, as they say.

And folks dressed up like Eskimos

This is one of the first tree ornaments I remember buying in the first few years that I was out on my own. It is, I think, one of those Hallmark ornaments in the Keepsake line. I wish I could remember what it cost back then. This will be (give me a moment to do the math) its forty-third year.

Ronald Reagan had just been elected president. Yikes!

We're keeping our eyes out for the landscape contractor. He emailed me a couple of weeks ago to say his team would be here to trim the hedges "next week." That was last week. I'm sure he's backed up with work because of the rainy weather we've been having. They'll get here when they get here.